Hidden Depths
by lookitallthecolors
Summary: After ten long years of inactivity, a modified Auto has been given a second chance. What discoveries will he and his new assistant make, perhaps even in themselves, while exploring a changing world?
1. Chapter 1

"Auto, as I said, not now. For _some_ reason, people already have enough trouble trusting you, least of all if you had a new gopherbot. When you've done some good work for the colony, they probably won't mind me authorizing you a GO-4 unit. Until then, you'll just have to make do."

After a buzz of irritation, Auto said, **"Captain, unless I have an assistant, it is impossible to accomplish the directives you have assigned to me. In case you have not noticed, sir, I am not particularly mobile."**

McCrea snorted. "That problem didn't stop you from running the Axiom."

**"That was different, sir."**

"Really? How?"

Without replying, the wheel-shaped robot zoomed along one of his ceiling-mounted tracks to a nearby console. He stabbed a button with a spoke, bringing up a rapidly scrolling list on the holoscreen. Many of the entries stated: DATA MISSING.

Auto turned to regard McCrea with his red ocular. **"Onboard the Axiom, the central computer was constantly updated with both passenger and robotic activities, and the ship's general status. Using this data, I could respond to any complications that occurred and resolve them.**

**"I still have access to the technical reports of the Axiom's functioning, due to the integral links between the central computer and the ship itself. The robots also have been dependably uploading their activity logs when returning to for their yearly servicing."**

**"With the humans, their hoverchairs had provided full status reports and personal history records, updated daily. However…"** He tilted to consider the standing captain's feet, which shifted uneasily.

**"…that resource is not available to me, currently. And while your colonists' have shown much enthusiasm for using the BnL Handheld Datapad, they have displayed less in regard to keeping their logs updated. As the device doesn't perform this function automatically, there has been a fall to fifteen point four five percent of current human-related records available, sir.**

**"And without constantly updated, accurate information databases, I am unable to perform the advisory functions that you wish."**

McCrea resisted the impulse to take out his own personal datapad, and instead fidgeted. The thing would plead him to fill out its' info logs whenever he used it, but, well, he just never got the time. Never seemed that important, anyway.

Then he got an idea. "Wait a minute, Auto. I do keep all the essential colony records on hard copy, in my office. I've written down almost all the important stuff that's happened since we landed. Important decisions, births, marriages, crop yields, the sort of statistics you'd like. You're welcome to come on down to my place and look through my, uh… papers…" He trailed off.

**"You see the conundrum, Captain. In addition, even if you were to move these papers to the bridge, I would have severe difficulty in looking through these 'hard copies' without assistance."** Auto waved a spoke to illustrate his point, and the captain looked at it, frowning.

It was hard to imagine the autopilot digging through the numerous filing cabinets, trying to read the nearly transparent sheets of paper that'd been accumulated over the years. Plus, McCrea had to admit, he'd been forgetting to organize those records for ages. The insides of the cabinets resembled trash cans more than a repository of the colony's history.

Sensing that he was close to convincing the captain, Auto added, **"It would also be helpful to have an assistant who would be free to gather environmental samples, as well as recovering information on colony activities. We may be sitting on unknown resources that are waiting to be tapped…"**

With a thoughtful expression, McCrea nodded. "Okay. I get the picture. Let me think about it, and I'll get back with you. Is that alright, Auto?"

**"Excellent, sir. I will be glad to hear from you once you have made your decision."** Auto saluted his captain with his claw, certain that his case was made.

* * *

"Hello?"

Auto felt someone rapping on his outer casing. He came out of standby mode, and activated his ocular only to come face to metaphorical face with a rather too familiar white, egg-shaped robot. EVE.

He jerked back along his track in surprise, managing to suppress the irrational desire to flick on his taser. Then he felt rather foolish, as he recognized that the 'bot was not EVE unit 001. That probe still heartily despised Auto since the incident involving WALL-E. Then again, it seemed that everyone 'bot or human disliked him, which he really didn't understand. He had merely been fulfilling his duties.

Irritated with the intrusion, he said, **"EVE unit 004. The bridge is a restricted area. Why are you trespassing on it?"**

The EVE unit squinted up at him, one of those bizarre, human-like habits that many of the robots had picked up. "I was assigned here. Remember?"

**"Negative."** He circled around her once, closely examining her, causing the probe to shift into a defensive posture. Auto tried to ignore her stance, and said, **"I have not requested that an EVE unit be requisitioned for my use. Therefore, you are incorrect, and probably attempting deception. Please leave immediately, before I am forced to take measures."**

Unperturbed by what was probably an idle threat, she replied, "Yes, _you_ didn't have me assigned here. The Captain did. I'm supposed to be your adjutant, stupid."

Auto's processor strips whirled, as he assimilated this new datum. **"I must verify this."** Without waiting for a response from the probe, he went over to the communications console, and paged McCrea's datapad.

A few rings later, and McCrea responded. Unhappily, there were no visuals. The sound of frenetic hammering filled the background. "Yeah? What is it, Auto?"

Turning to glare at the other robot, Auto said, **"There is an EVE probe, specifically unit 004, in the bridge, sir. It is claiming to have been assigned by you to be my new adjutant."**

"What? Unit 004? Oh, you mean Violet. That's right, she- No, don't put that…!" There was a loud crash. "Sorry, Auto, we're renovating one of the old warehouses. Anyway, yep. I talked it over with Violet, and she was the only one of Eve's sisters who didn't immediately refuse when I asked if she could help out."

**"Captain. You did not consult with me on this. I do not wish to have an EVE unit 'helping' me. I still have concerns about their… stability."** He disregarded Violet's quiet 'Hmph!'

"What do you mean by that?" There was a pause. "Oh, it's 'cause Eve was one of the first to change, isn't it? Auto, you've gotta get over your obsession with how the 'bots have been changing their direc-" A muffled shout, followed by the screeching sound of metal on metal.

"Look, I've really got to go, so I'll just say this once. I decided that I really can't approve the construction of a new Gopher. When I ran it past a bunch of people, they objected. Violently. I think they're still too many bad memories. But I understood that you're having real difficulties doing much of anything useful, so I asked Violet to lend a hand.

"She's smart, mobile, and can do all that fine handwork that you admitted you can't do. If you don't want her assistance, that's fine. But she's the only capable 'bot that I can spare to help. So unless you want me to assign, I don't know, VN-GO to you, you just need to suck it up. Okay?"

With the praise that McCrea had given, Violet looked very smug indeed. Auto was still staring at her, feeling his frustration mount. The worst part of it all was that McCrea was right. **"Very well, sir."** He cut the transmission, and said flatly, **"EVE unit 004."**

Violet's air of self-satisfaction disappeared.

**"I am assigning you a new directive. You are to recover the colonial records stored at McCrea's office, in the town, and deliver them to the bridge. You will be assigned a transport in order to relocate this information. It will be waiting at Airlock 015. Be prompt, as delays will not be tolerated."** One of Auto's spokes twisted, and the bridge's elevator door slid open with a ding.

**"You are dismissed."**

He waited in cold silence for an answering salute, but none came. The probe 'bot turned and left without saying a single word.


	2. Chapter 2

It was lot of long, hard work. There were thirty cabinets in all, and the MV-R could only take two at a time. And considering Violet's size, half of the job was just getting the gigantic things _onto_ the hovercart.

Even after delivering a pair of the cabinets to the bridge, she couldn't just go back to McCrea's office to get another load. She'd have to remove every one of the drawers out of the filing containers, and position them on a series of restriction field 'tables' so that that the autopilot could have access to the papers. After doing that, then she could leave, starting the whole exhausting process all over again.

With an electronic grunt, she heaved a second cabinet on top of the MV-R. Violet paused to take a short break, as she was draining her power reserves at an alarming rate. The only other time that she had ever felt this tired was after she had flown for hours. It wouldn't be long before she'd have to go into sleep mode, in order to recharge her battery from her internal microfusion reactor.

She leaned her head against the side of the hovercart, making a soft _thunk._ This was stupid, menial work, which pretty much anybot could do. But no, she had to _volunteer._

When the Captain had gone into his song and dance asking for one of them to do a task 'for the good of the colony,' all of the probes had been receptive. Heck, they had been falling over themselves to help out. But when he revealed that this new assignment involved working for Auto…

Eve flat out refused, Rose blustered about how she thought that reactivating the autopilot was a mistake 'they'd all regret,' Lily claimed that she had too many other commitments, and sweet, naïve Daisy had burst out crying at the thought of being in the same room as Auto. Which left Violet.

She still wasn't quite sure as to why she had agreed to McCrea's request. Part of her knew that the job needed doing. Despite the feelings that she shared with her sisters about Auto, she recognized that he could still be an important part of the colony. Just to write him off as evil, or crazy, seemed rather stupid.

Violet was also just plain curious. After all, helping out the autopilot of a starliner would probably be more interesting then the endless cropland surveys and agriculture she had been doing for a decade. He had been her ultimate superior, long ago, the 'bot that everyone had once both respected and admired.

So she acted, once again, _stupid,_ and volunteered to do Auto's scutwork. Carrying giant, stupid filing cabinets, loading them onto a stupid hovercart, and take them on a stupidly long trip to a stupid wheel whose designers had been so stupid as to make him completely friggin' immobile.

Yes, Violet was finding that she liked the word stupid. She felt that it could apply to so many things, right now.

She was glaring with hatred at the objects that were the bane of her existence, when she realized something. Slapping her smooth, metallic forehead, she groaned. It was so obvious!

All this time, Violet had been only loading two of the containers at a time, because of the MV-R's size. But what if she stacked them? Then she could get twice as many in one trip.

She clapped her hands with glee, and zoomed into the building. Getting the next set of cabinets didn't seem to be the chore it once was, as she was happily contemplating the fact that her current mission's size had been cut in half.

After carefully stacking them, she paused. The transport didn't seem to be having any trouble… maybe she could add a couple more?

* * *

When Violet added the tenth filing cabinet, she belatedly realized that she had gone a bit overboard. With a hissing pop, the MV-R's motor apparently burned out. There was an earth-shattering thump, and the hovercart crashed to the ground.

Luckily, it was late enough in the day that no one was around to witness her mistake. After five o' clock, most people left the administrative quarter. She began to hurriedly haul off the containers, hoping that the damage wasn't irreparable.

Once the vehicle was clear, it became evident that something was very wrong, but she had no clue as to what. Violet began scrabbling at the hovercart with her fingers, trying to remove it from its perfectly MV-R-shaped impression so that she could get a better look.

She finally got a purchase on one of its bumpers. With a yell, she pulled with all her might.

Already suffering from hundreds of hairline fractures caused by the impact the poor vehicle had endured, the bumper was torn from the hovercart with a terrific screech of twisting metal. Due to the amount of effort she had been putting in, she was flung back into a nearby building, leaving a new Violet-shaped hole to complement the one in the ground.

If she had been more like Eve, she would have likely blasted the hovercart, the cabinets, and probably the nearby buildings to pieces with her plasma gun. As it was, she settled with hurling the offending hunk of metal as far as she could.

As it became a rapidly receding speck, she failed to remember an important fact. What goes up, must come down.

* * *

BURN-E unit 047, or Bernie as he preferred to be called, was ecstatic to get off work. He did enjoy his job, but he had been using all his spare time for a _very_ special project.

For the upcoming tenth anniversary of New Hope's founding, he had been putting together something that he felt would rival Gogh's famous five-year celebratory mural. A beautiful diorama, depicting in fine detail the events that led to their returning to Earth. He had even created a tiny bridge, with an autopilot that had a real working taser! He was still figuring out how to get the mini-Captain to wrestle with the faux-Auto, through.

He flicked on his blow-torch, and began humming a few bars from _Till Eulenspiegel._ Today felt like a Strauss day.

Bernie had disassembled the pint-sized McCrea, when his melody was disrupted. He tilted his head, and blinked. It sounded familiar, like… whistling?

With the distinct feeling of dread filling him, he looked up, out of his open-air workshop. He saw a rapidly descending chunk of metal falling from the sky, which he dazedly recognized as being the bumper of a MV-R unit.

There was no time to duck, let alone run away.

_CLANG._

Shivering, Bernie uncovered his eyescreen. Initially, he was astounded to be alive. Then he noticed what had been done to his project of the past seven months.

* * *

Violet was still thumping angrily at the hovercart, trying to get it working again, when she heard a distant scream. She stopped for a moment, and then shrugged. Probably had nothing to do with her.

She was about to go back to fiddling with the vehicle, when she heard a 'bot buzz its vocoder behind her, trying to get her attention.

Spinning around to give whoever it was a piece of her mind, her eyes widened in recognition. "Oh. Hi, Wall-e."

"Hi, Vi-let." As always, he mispronounced her name. He looked from her, to the sad looking hovercart. "Do you need help?"

Privately, she doubted that the cube-shaped trash compacter could do much to salvage this mess. However, she assented. What more damage could he do?

"Sure."

He nodded, and rolled forward on his treads, right up to the MV-R. "Hmm." He squinted. Then with a single, deft motion, Wall-e ripped off the outer casing to the motor.

Taking a cursory look inside, he said, "Fuse burned out."

"Really?" She angrily beeped. "Then I guess I'll have to go all the way back to the ship's supply room to get a new one…"

He held up a claw. "Nope, Vi-let." He removed the icebox from his back, and rummaged inside it. Presenting a rather unremarkable looking device, he said proudly, "Ta-da!"

Wall-e reached into the motor with his other claw, and picked out a fuse that looked almost identical to the one he was holding, except blackened all over. After replacing it with the new one, he gave the MV-R a little tap. It lifted off the ground effortlessly, engine humming.

Her eyes smiling, Violet said, "Wow. Thanks, Wall-e! You're a real mechanic!"

Wall-e made a little self-deprecating gesture, as though to suggest that this was only a hobby of his. "You're welcome." Then, after waving goodbye, he picked up his icebox and went on his way.

Violet watched him roll off. Each time she saw Wall-e, he seemed to reveal some new, hidden facet of his personality. She had never met anyone quite like him. Too bad he was already hooked up with Eve…

She shook herself mentally. It was getting late, and she couldn't really waste time wondering about might-have-beens. Violet took great care to only load two cabinets this time, and prepared to go back to the _Axiom._


	3. Chapter 3

Violet had trouble exiting the elevator, as the way out was nearly blocked by a forest of empty filing cabinets. She stopped the hovercart, and began to unload it.

Throughout the bridge was an ordered series of blue, shimmering restriction fields, horizontally projected by a few field emitters. Stacked neatly on the surfaces of the 'tables' were dozens of metal boxes, bulging with papers. Auto was poking through one of them with a claw, when he noticed her entrance.

"**EVE probe 004-"**

"It's Violet."

Auto gave her a blank stare. **"EVE probe 004, you are late."**

Bristling, she said, "Well, I had just a _little_ trouble getting this load in, alright? Anyway, since you've so kindly given me only one MV-R to work with, it takes me a lot longer than it should to move these…" Violet waved at one of the many cabinets in the room. "…things."

"**You were unable to perform your task with maximum effieciency due to not having sufficient transportation capabilities?"**

"Yes!"

"**Why did you not request for additional MV-R units, probe 004? I could have assigned additional transports to you."** His processor strips rotated serenely.

Violet spluttered. "Wh- But- Why didn't you tell me that earlier!?"

Another stare. **"You did not state that you were having difficulties."**

"You know, Auto, you _suck_."

For a second, Violet felt extremely satisfied to see his utter confusion in response to her remark. Then, clearly deciding that his conversation had gone on far longer than it should have, he changed the subject.

"**Regardless, we have enough material gathered here to proceed. We can collect the rest tomorrow."** He tapped a button on the temporarily set up console that controlled the restriction fields, lowering their surfaces so Violet could access the drawers resting on top easily.

"**Your directive is to assist me in the process of digitizing the papers contained within these boxes. I have already begun sorting the papers into specific categories."** He pointed at one of the fields, which already had a bunch of documents piled atop. Violet looked at them, but couldn't see any rhyme or reason for their organization.

She was about to hazard a question, when Auto rolled on with his explanation. **"I will be sifting through the boxes that have been set up, and classify them according to type. You will be at this station, where the categorized papers are. You will go through them, and read all of the papers from each category to the shipboard computer. I have already programmed the basic templates of the types of reports that are present, so the computer will be able to transcribe them."**

That sounded time-consuming, but not as hard as moving those dumb cabinets had been. "Okay."

Auto glared at her, plainly still unhappy with her lack of respect for authority. Then, with a click, he moved over and began to rifle through one of the many drawers.

Violet hovered over to a report stack. She picked up the topmost paper, and looked it over. Crop statistics, _bleh._ She had enough of that back when she was helping with the farming, thank you very much.

She gave a small tap to her vocoder, and began reading the statistics aloud.

Auto jerked up, and almost dropped a folder that he was holding. **"Stop."**

"What?"

He said, in an accusatory tone, **"You are not speaking in machine-code. Inefficient. Speaking in anything other than machine-code to the computer adds unnecessary amounts of time to the process of transcription."**

"I don't talk in machine-code anymore, Auto. None of us do, anymore." _Except for you, you old dinosaur._

"**Even the **_**menials**_**? They do not have the necessary equipment to speak in Human!"**

"Well, yeah, but they try their best. We don't have a law against doing that."

He was silent for a while. Then a spoke twitched. **"Insane. Machine-code allows greater information density, and should generally be preferred when humans are not present. And menials are **_**never**_** in the presence of a human."**

"But they are now!" Violet pointed out.

Auto shuddered in disgust. **"I had no idea the situation had progressed this far. A menial should not be… **_**mingling**_** with the passengers!"**

"Stop calling them 'menials,' Auto. You make it sound like a dirty word." Then she registered the last sentence he had said. "So, why can't they hang out with the humans, Mr. Snooty?"

"**It is not ****proper****. The sign of a properly functioning ship is one where the passengers are nearly unaware of the presence of the menials that serve them. Contact is restricted."**

"Contact _was_ restricted," she corrected. "And what is this about the ship? We aren't all on the _Axiom_, anymore, remember?"

"**I… yes. You are correct, I was being illogical,"** Auto said reluctantly, obviously loathe to admit that fact. Then he remembered the task at hand. **"Please clarify. Are you or are you not going to use machine-code with the computer?"**

Violet folded her arms. "No."

One of Auto's servos ground loudly. **"Insane,"** he repeated.

Seeing how distressed he looked, she relented. Only a bit, though. "Couldn't I just use a BnL link cable, and after reading the info have the computer pull it out of me?"

"**No!"** Violet backed up, surprised by the vehemence of his answer. **"You should **_**never **_**use a link cable with the Central Computer. As it is not a diagnostic system, like the one in the repair ward, you could damage yourself permanently." **

After repudiating her suggestion, Auto was quiet again, lost in thought. Then, seeming to come to a decision, he zipped over to one of the ports in the bridge's floor. He opened it, and disappeared down into the captain's cabin.

Violet was debating with herself about whether to follow him when he was gone for more than five minutes, when he returned, clutching something in his claw. It was a datapad, which he handed to her.

"**I am amending my orders. You will read the papers, and then type their contents into this datapad. When you are finished, you will upload the data into CentComp. While not as quick as the earlier procedure that I had assigned, this new method will still be within acceptable time constraints."**

"Oh. Thanks." She kept floating in front of the autopilot, stationary.

"**Well? Why are you not proceeding?"**

"I hate to admit this, but… I don't know how to use datapads. Sorry." Violet looked down at the ground, feeling incredibly embarrassed.

"**Must I do everything?"** Auto clicked noisily to himself, irked. **"Do you know of any other person, or robot, that knows how to utilize the BnL Handheld Datapad?"**

"Uh… My sister Lily does, actually. Yeah, she always has one on her, for her work."

"**Sister? Robots do not have sisters, least of all ones named Lily. Are you certain that your memory banks are functioning corr-"** He stopped. **"Are you referring to EVE probe 003?"**

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I guess."

Auto dipped, his equivalent of a nod, oblivious to the meaning of Violet's gesture. **"Since you are not able to use a datapad, and the knowledge of the device's use is vital for your current directive, I am releasing you early, so as to learn the details of how to operate the BnL Handheld Datapad from EVE probe 003. **

"**You are to return at 0600 hours, EVE probe 004."**

**

* * *

**

Violet gave a tentative knock on the door of the greenhouse. After waiting for a few minutes, she tried the door. It was wide open, so she went right on in.

A profusion of different kinds of flora filled the building. Lily had always been the probe most fascinated with plants. This, at first glance, didn't seem too unusual. All of the EVE sisters were programmed with basic knowledge of botany, enough to help them in their original directive to locate photosynthetic organisms.

Lily was different. She lived and breathed plants, so to speak. After the landing, she had used the free time she had previously never had to exhaustively study the science of agriculture and gardening. It was with her help that New Hope had even managed to get a crop worth anything, in the first year.

After year four, Lily had decided that she needed a proper experimental greenhouse, isolated from the harsh elements, in order to help her reconstitute the varied plant ecosystems that had once existed long ago. With the help of Bernie, and a whole legion of his friends, her wish became a reality.

Violet called out Lily's name a few times, but got no response. She started wandering the greenhouse, hoping to eventually run into her sister, as the building was exceptionally large. Gossip had it that some parents were already filling their children's heads with stories about groups of people who had wandered into the greenhouse, never to be seen again. What a bunch of hogwash.

At least she was glad for her internal mapping systems. It was quite impossible for an EVE 'bot to get lost, even in a place like this.

She was starting to get pretty frustrated after fifteen minutes had passed, with no sign of Lily, when she saw something completely new, that she had never noticed.

A Venus Flytrap. A really _big_ Venus Flytrap, sitting on a granite table. Some of the plant's 'mouths' seemed large enough to fit her head in.

"Oooo." She reached out a hand to touch it-

"Don't even think about it!" Someone slapped her on the back of the head, lightly.

Violet spun around, chagrined. "Umm… Hello, Lily."

Lily's eyes were narrowed to slits. In one hand, she was holding a large spray bottle. "I swear, first Daisy, then Rose, and now you! Can't anyone _read?"_ She pointed angrily down. There was a sign next to the plant, which said in three huge letters: DO NOT TOUCH.

"Sorry." Violet gave the plant a quick look. "Is it unsafe?"

"Pfft! Is it _unsafe_, she asks. Here, hold this." Handing the bottle over to the other 'bot, she went up to the plant. With great care, she pulled one of the flytraps blades down, where they could more easily see one of the 'mouths.' It was black all over.

"Daisy did that. Said she was just curious, and wanted to see if they really closed as fast as the cartoons showed they did." Lily gently let go of the frond. "What no one realizes is that Venus Flytraps are _delicate_. I have a hard enough time as it is keeping the darned thing alive, let alone if people insist on coming in and randomly poking it, over and over. Bottle, please."

"Oh, right." Violet passed the sprayer over, and watched as Lily gave the flytrap a few spritzes. She then reached under the table it was sitting on, and pulled out a large glass lid. After covering the plant with a _thunk,_ she said by way of explanation, "These naughty buggers will dry out the moment you take your eye off them. Have to keep them covered. _Always_ covered."

After giving it a last look-over, she nodded, satisfied. She then grabbed her datapad out of her storage chamber. After reaching up to nab the stylus she kept magnetically stuck onto the side of her head, she jotted down a few quick notes on the pad.

Once she was finished, Lily said offhandedly, "So, is there a reason for you coming here? Or did you just feel like dropping by?"

"Both, actually. I always enjoy visiting you, Lil," Violet said shyly.

"Aw. Well, I like you too, Vi." She clipped the stylus back on her head. "If you have the free time, would you like a look at my latest project?"

"Sure!"

"Okay, just stay behind me." They zipped along, taking several turns before getting to a door marking the delineation between two different sections, and climates, of the greenhouse. Above the entryway was a sign labeled: ORCHARD.

When Lily opened the door, Violet gasped in amazement. Inside the room were what seemed like a hundred different trees, all straining up to the fluorescent lighting. Each was festooned with fruit.

"Apples, mostly," Lily said. "I'm still doing a _lot _of work on them, as they're the hardest. I got going the citrus fruit seeds we had in cold storage without too much trouble. It only took me a short while to recreate some of the old varieties.

"The apples, though… Some complete idiot who stocked the plants for Operation Re-Colonize conveniently forgot that the main way apples reproduce is by grafting, _not_ seeds."

Violet gave her sister a funny look. "Grafting?"

"Yeah, grafting. In the old days, if you decided you wanted a new apple tree of a certain type, you'd take off one of that type's branches. Then you'd plant a different, but usually hardier variety, and graft the other tree's branch onto it. Voila! You've got your favorite apples."

"Of course, you're probably asking why they did this. They had their reasons. The main one being that while apple trees would produce a very consistent crop, year after year, the _seeds_ were a whole 'nother story. Try to plant them, and, well…"

She flew up to one of the trees, and came back holding a very misshapen fruit. "…you end up with this. They taste like Styrofoam, basically. _Bitter_ Styrofoam. I've had my work cut out just trying to get edible varieties again; I'm not even worrying about trying to make them really tasty."

Violet took the proffered apple. She turned it, over and over. It more closely resembled a potato, than an apple. While examining the lumpy piece of produce, she became conscious of something. "Wait a minute… how would you know how this tasted, Lil?"

"I gave one to John, of course, silly. He'll eat anything, at least once." Pause. "Well, almost anything. After the pineapple incident, his wife threatened to kill me if I fed him something that suspicious looking ever again."

"Pineapple incident?"

Lily shuddered. "Trust me; you do not want to know."

"Ooookay." She gave back the apple to the other 'bot, and then checked her internal clock. It was already getting pretty late. "Lil, I need you to help me with something. It's about Auto."

"Really? That's funny, I was just about to ask you for a favor related to him, too. But you go first."

She whipped out her new datapad. "Can you teach me how to use this thing?"

"_Can_ I?" With a squeal, Lily gave Violet a frame-crushing hug. "Finally, Vi! I knew you'd come around to using a datapad! Of course, I'd be happy to!"

Violet whimpered as her body let out several ominous sounding creaks. "Urk. Let… Go…"

"Whoops." Lily released her sister from her embrace. "Sorry. Alright, I'll train you in how to use a datapad, under one condition."

"Shoot."

Taking out a data storage card, she said, "I've got some concerns about the crop yields for the past ten years. They've been twenty percent lower than the computer projection for every single harvest. Do you think you could have Auto take a look at these reports I've assembled? Maybe he could figure out what's going on…"

Violet put the card into her own storage chamber. "I'll give it a try. Now, what about my tutoring, Professor Lily?"

"Right, right. I haven't forgotten. Let me get my stuff, and we'll be all set."


	4. Chapter 4

_Vweep. Vweep. Vweep. Vweep._

Violet awoke groggily, mentally cursing the internal alarm she had set to wake her up at precisely 5:30 AM. She had not gotten the usual six hours of downtime due to staying up late so Lily could teach her how to use a datapad. She wished that she could sleep in for just a few minutes more, but Auto, being a stickler for protocol, was probably expecting her right at 6:00.

Hovering out of her cubbyhole, she glanced into the three other nooks to see if her sisters were even up yet. Upon seeing them still blissfully slumbering in their egg forms, she sighed. It was so unfair.

She went over to her personal footlocker, off in the corner of the one-room brick house she shared with her siblings. While digging out her datapad, along with some data sticks that she might need, Violet wished that Eve still lived with them. Eve had been always been an early riser, and it would have been nice to have a quick chat with a family member before having to face another day of drudgery with a humorless autopilot.

Alas, it was not to be. Two years ago, Eve had moved in with Wall-e, after their 'marriage.' And while outwardly Violet had been ecstatic, and cheered with everyone else at the ceremony, she couldn't help but notice that the house felt a little emptier.

Of course, Daisy had to make things worse by whining for weeks about how sad she was that they were one family member fewer. She had only stopped when Rose had threatened to kick her out to join her newly married sister.

As she checked the charge on the datapad, Violet shrugged. From her point of view, if wishes were horses, everyone'd be knee deep in horse crap. No point in moping about just because Eve was moving on in life.

After stowing her stuff away inside her storage chamber, Violet left the house, making sure to quietly close the door behind her.

* * *

To Auto, everything seemed to be going quite smoothly. With the rate the reports were being processed, they'd likely be finished by early to mid afternoon. Progress was more than satisfactory. It was exemplary.

So he was quite astonished when, in response to a polite request for her to pass him one of several R32 Type A requisition forms, EVE probe 004 responded by hurling her datapad right at his ocular. He barely had enough time to dodge the projectile, causing it to sail past his frame before landing next to the trash chute.

"My name is Violet. Violet! Are you forgetting it on purpose, you dumb wheel?!"

Auto fussily picked up the fallen datapad to check if it was damaged. Suspecting that her question was probably rhetorical, he disregarded it and said, **"Yes, I am aware that informally, you are known as Violet. However, your proper designation is EVE probe 004."**

"Argh!" She floated up to Auto, and gave him a vicious poke. "I am quite aware that I used to be 'EVE probe 004.' But my name now is Violet, okay?"

"**Acknowledged. Your informal designation is Violet, EVE probe 004."** In an attempt to defuse a situation he did not fully understand, he tried to hand her back the datapad, so they could get back to work. She refused to take it, clearly not willing to let go of the point she was trying to make.

"No, Auto. Violet's my _name_, not an 'informal designation.' Get what I'm saying?"

Like he had been doing so often lately, Auto stared blankly at her. **"In actuality, I do not 'get what you are saying.' Do you mean that you have been assigned a new unit designation?"**

Violet began feeling angry enough to blow a fuse, perhaps even literally, when she recognized that Auto was genuinely confused. Her eyes softened. "Wow. You really don't understand…" She gave him a look filled with something he had never been subjected to before. Pity.

After an awkward silence, she said, "Auto. None of the 'bots use their old unit designations anymore. Around a year after we landed, we began picking out names, real names, for each robot. Each of us chose one, just based on what we wanted to be called. They weren't assigned to us."

She waved at the many paper stacks in the room. "You shouldn't be so surprised, after all. I know that some of the records you've been sorting documented name changes. I think I even noticed you earlier with my own registration form."

Auto's faceplate shifted almost unnoticeably. **"You are certain of this fact?"**

Violet gave an electronic snort. "No, I'm just _randomly_ making things up," she said sarcastically. "Yeah, I'm certain!"

"**Ah."** He hesitated for a moment. **"I am afraid that upon discovering the name registrations, I assumed they were erroneous. As the sheer idea of robot-initiated re-designation is preposterous, the only logical conclusion was that an individual submitted these applications as a prank, or practical joke. I have been slating all robotic name registrations for disposal."**

She blinked. "What the hell_, _Auto? Are you saying you _threw them away?"_

"**Negative."**

Violet's fingers began twitching, as she yearned for Auto to have a neck to throttle. While she was making her second wish of the day, the unobservant autopilot continued speaking.

"**You misinterpreted what I stated. The name registrations have been _slated_ for disposal****. I have not thrown them away, as of yet."** He turned to a restriction field table, and lifted a stack of papers with a claw, and several spokes. Giving Violet scarcely enough time to react, he unceremoniously dumped them in her arms. The pile was nearly as tall as she was.

"**As these papers are no longer marked for destruction, you will need to add them to your transcription queue."** Auto clicked loudly, while he checked his internal clock. **"You should also consider picking up the pace. With these additional papers I estimate that, at your current rate, it will take you an additional three point seven hours to finish all your assigned duties."**

"Gee, thanks, Auto."

"**You are welcome."** He looked at her solemnly. **"Thank you for informing me of my clerical error, EVE pr-" **Pause.** "Violet."**


	5. Chapter 5

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, they were finished with both organizing and scanning the files. They didn't even have to worry about relocating the rest of the archives, because while they had been feverishly working, Auto had managed to prevail upon Captain McCrea to temporarily assign some stewards to help move the remaining cabinets.

Violet would have wondered why Auto hadn't done this earlier, if she had not known that the SECUR-T units were always in heavy demand due to the utility of their suspension beams. According to Rose, who specialized in demolition work, the stewards excelled at handling heavy, awkwardly shaped debris.

All that was left was to put the now neatly sorted documents back into the cabinets, and then they could call it a day. McCrea promised that some stewardbots would show up tomorrow to move everything back to his office.

While inserting a stack of folders into a drawer, Violet suddenly realized that she had completely forgotten to give Auto her sister's data stick. She finished putting the folders away, before fishing out the card. "Auto? I just remembered that I have something I needed to give you…"

"**Please wait."** The autopilot closed the cabinet he was looking through, before moving up to Violet. He lowered himself in order to pick up the data stick with a claw, and regarded it balefully with his red ocular. **"What is this?"**

Violet had her hands behind her back, feeling a bit nervous. "It's, uh, from one of my sisters, Lily. She thought you had better take a look at it, said it had to do with crop yields."

"**Lily."** His processor strips flashed, as he accessed his memory banks. **"That is the EVE probe who advises on matters pertaining to agricultural development, and conducts crop experiments, correct? ****The one you received instruction from yesterday evening?"**

"Actually, yes."

"**She has amassed an impressive amount of knowledge in botany, within a relatively short amount of time. It would be unwise to ignore her, if she has any reservations pertaining to her field of study. Very well, I accept your sister's request." **Auto quickly rolled along his track to the Science and Data Analysis console, which possessed a data card reader, and plugged the stick in. Despite herself, Violet couldn't help but feel amazed. She had been expecting a giant battle to even convince him to take the data stick, let alone examine the information on it.

It only took a few quick seconds for the card to load, and then a succession of windows popped up on the holoscreen. Some appeared to be text documents, while others were almost entirely spreadsheets and graphs. Auto scrolled incredibly fast through all of them, reading the files at speeds even an EVE probe couldn't hope to match.

When he finished analyzing the data, he swiveled around to face the white robot. **"Lily is correct. There is a troubling lag between theoretical and actual crop yields."** He let out a buzz. **"While I have some predictions as to the possible causes of this effect, there is currently insufficient data to allow any degree of certainty. More information must be gathered."**

With a sinking feeling, Violet said, "Let me guess. I'm going to be the one who is gathering this info, right?"

"**Correct."** With a spoke, he tapped a lengthy sequence of buttons on the SDA console. The computer chimed, and then spat out a device that resembled a resembled an oversized, streamlined revolver. Inside a clear chamber, near the back of the 'gun,' were hundreds of glass tubes.

Auto handed the tool to her, and said, **"This is a Type 1 Soil Sampler. Insert the 'barrel' of the device a minimum of ten centimeters into the area you wish to sample, and then push the green button located at the handle. The tool will automatically draw up a three-inch cylindrical portion of soil, before storing the sample and readying a new cylinder."**

Violet looked at the underside of the tool, where the trigger of a normal gun would have been. Sure enough, there was a green button that just screamed, 'Push me!' Resisting the temptation to do so, she said, "Okay, I understand how to use this thing. But how do I know what I'll be sampling?"

"**Please give me your datapad."** She handed it to the autopilot, and he inserted it into a slot perfectly sized to accommodate it. There was a grinding noise, and then Auto removed the datapad and gave it back to Violet.

"**On the standardized onboard map, the agricultural plots I wish to have surveyed will be highlighted blue. In each plot, ten transects will be drawn. You will follow these transects, and at randomly determined intervals the datapad will tell you to take a sample. When you are finished sampling a plot, an alarm will ring. There will be thirty plots in total."**

Violet decided to repeat what Auto had just said in her own words, to make sure she understood him. "So, I'm going to be going to sampling from thirty crop fields. Each one will have ten lines drawn through it, and I'm going to follow these lines, sampling whenever the datapad says to. And when it rings, then I move to the next field. Right?"

"**Correct."**

"Well, that doesn't sound too hard. I'll get started tomorrow morning." She turned to leave the bridge via the elevator, when the sound of Auto's voice brought her to a halt.

"**Stop. Are you not going to begin sampling immediately?"**

"Um, hello? It's already five-thirty. I'm going home."

"**Why?"**

"To enjoy what miniscule amounts of free time I have left, of course. What else?" She began to tap the sampling gun against her frame impatiently. "Can I go now?"

"**I see,"** he said, even though he really didn't. **"Yes, of course. Please return at 0600, as per usual."**

Long after the elevator doors closed, Auto continued to stare at them in consternation. Robots had no need for eating, or to entertain themselves. Even the need for 'sleep' was minimal, limited to six hours whether you relied on an internal microfusion reactor or a charge station. Their only directive was to _work._

So of what use is free time?


	6. Chapter 6

Another morning, another routine. And while Violet's new job of soil sampling was formulaic, and rather boring, it didn't compare to the sheer level of drudgery of moving those awful filing cabinets.

And when she needed to go back to exchange the filled sampling tubes for new ones, at least she got to fly back to the Axiom. That really helped to cut down the travel time. Plus, it was fun.

Content in the knowledge that it could always be worse, she was sampling her way down an orange grove when she paused, and cocked her head. Someone was talking to himself.

"…um, is that a circumference of six inches? No, no, wait, I forgot the decimal place. Six point four, no, three. I think.

"Oh, bolts. I'm supposed to put it in _centimeters._ Crap, crap, crap."

There was the sound of frantic datapad erasing, followed by a load groan. "I hate this _so much._"

Correction, that didn't sound like a him. It was a her. Violet looked around, and caught sight of a worried looking EVE probe clutching some measuring tape, and a datapad. She was floating next to a tree, only a dozen meters distant.

"Hey, Daisy," Violet shouted. "Over here!"

"Eek!" The other robot shrieked, dropping the objects she had been holding. Then, when she saw who it was, she hurriedly scooped them back up, flustered. "Oh, hi, Violet."

Violet zoomed up to her 'youngest' sister, who held up the datapad nervously like it was some sort of protective talisman.

Daisy had always been a worrywart. As EVE probe 005, she had been kept as the reserve probe in case something unexpected happened to the others. Due to this, she had been active for the smallest amount of time amongst the probes, and had only been outside of the Axiom twice before they had come to Earth.

And her anxious disposition hadn't been helped any when, in order to 'toughen her up,' Rose had locked her out in the middle of a sandstorm. Rose claimed that being afraid of natural weather phenomena was silly, and that Daisy should learn to stop acting like an infant. "After all," she had said, "BnL designed us to be the toughest and most resilient 'bots, period. What can a little sand and wind do to an EVE probe?"

The agoraphobia Daisy developed as a result of this event was severe, and it had taken her weeks before she was even able to leave their home. She still suffered panic attacks if the wind got up to a high speed.

Realizing that her sister was probably on edge as a result of in such an open place, Violet deliberately toned down her bearing. After a moment, Daisy's body untensed.

Letting out an uneasy laugh, Daisy said, "Nice to, er, see you, Vi. Funny that you're here, at the same place as I am…"

"Auto assigned me to get some soil specimens, I've been going through most of the ag fields." She started to wave the sampling gun to illustrate her point, only to arrest the motion when Daisy flinched. Chagrined, she said, "So... What are you doing here, Daisy? I thought you only had to do agricultural analysis on Tuesday. In fact, I seem to remember that today's when you work at the Repair Ward. Isn't that why Friday's your favorite part of the week?"

"Well…" Daisy drummed her fingers on the datapad. "I'm not really supposed to say…"

Violet's eyes narrowed. "Wait a minute; it isn't _Rose_ again, is it?"

The other 'bot began examining the tree in front of her as though it were the most interesting example of plant life in the entire world.

With an exasperated sigh, Violet said, "Daisy! You've gotta stand up for yourself eventually!" Pause. "Do you know where she is?"

Daisy continued to focus on the tree. Right when Violet was about to give up, her sister said, "In the old city. Corner of Park Avenue and 42nd street."

"Demolition work, right?'

"As always."

* * *

It wasn't too hard to find where Rose was working. Subsequent to getting in the general vicinity, all Violet had to do was follow the noise. She was able to quickly locate the gutted hulk of a skyscraper, where hundreds of humans and robots were working at a feverish pace to clear debris.

There was a man walking by, with a hardhat on. She stopped him and asked where Rose was. Shouting several words that were lost in the din, he pointed over to a section where WALL-As were compacting and stacking cubes of the metal that had once reinforced the building, watched over by a steward 'bot. Unsurprisingly, off to one side, a small white figure was flying around, blasting chunks of the skyscraper's former infrastructure into more manageable pieces.

She flew over to the work area, waiting for a lull in Rose's work. Sure enough, her sister soared down to take a break. With a yell, Violet caught the other EVE probe's attention.

With a suspicious expression on her eyescreen, Rose said, "Violet. I'm busy right now. Talk to you later."

"No, I won't. It's about Daisy."

"Yeah, what?"

Violet folded her arms. "You can't keep foisting jobs you don't like to do on her. I know for a fact that today you were supposed to be doing crop surveying, _not_ demolition."

"And?" Rose gave a shrug. "Look, Sam, my supervisor, asked me to help him out with this new project. When I talked it over with Daisy, she agreed that it would make more sense to go do something needed doing, and I enjoyed. She _offered_ to take over for that dumb tree surveying crap."

"You know, I highly doubt that. How much you want to bet that you just pressured her until she gave in, hmm?"

Rose looked her sister up and down, deliberately. "What are you going to do about it?"

After a moment of thought, Violet said, "I think I'll tell Eve about this."

"Ha! She's so busy mooning over that stupid trash compacter of hers, she won't get around to even giving me one of her harangues for a week, let alone anything practical. Try again." Rose glanced at the SECUR-T unit who supervising her. "And try to make it snappy, my break's over in two minutes."

"I'll… talk to McCrea! Since I've been working with Auto, I know the Captain on a first-name basis." _And that was a little white lie._ _Actually, make that a great big one._

"You wouldn't dare."

"Try me."

Rose muttered something to herself inaudibly. "Fine, fine. Let me just explain everything to my boss."

Following a terse exchange with Sam the SECUR-T 'bot, she moodily followed Violet back to the citrus grove where Daisy had been, only for them to discover it to be deserted.

Violet went around the tree where she remembered leaving Daisy, feeling pretty bewildered. "Why… where could she have gone?"

"Looks like she buggered off home. Too bad, since I totally forgot to bring my own datapad. See you l-"

A familiar voice rang out. "You stop right there this _instant_!" Up came Lily, who was clearly in a fine fury. Trailing behind her was Daisy, appearing thoroughly put-upon.

"Oh, crud." Rose hurriedly turned to leave for the city. "Hello, nice to see you, have to be going…"

With a deft motion, Lily grabbed one of Rose's arms, hauling her back. "Daisy told me all about what you did. You should be ashamed of yourself, taking advantage of one of your own sisters like that!"

"Sorry, I just thought-"

Lily cut off Rose before she could finish her sentence. "No, you _didn't_ think! You left her out here all alone, and with her condition- Why, anything could happen!"

Mumble, mumble.

"Don't you use that kind of language with me, Rose! I would've thought you'd know better than that! Personally, I think you're too enamored with your plasma gun. You need to learn that's more to life than destroying things! What you should be doing is…"

While Lily launched into a speech she gave to Rose at least once a week, Violet hovered up to Daisy's side, who seemed to be unhappy with the whole proceedings. She gave the timid probe a pat. "Sorry about what happened."

"It's okay." Daisy slumped over slightly. "Sometimes, though, I just wish that people would leave me alone."

"I know, it's hard having Rose pick on you all the time-"

"No, that's not all of it." She waved at the confrontation going on in front of them. Lily was gesticulating wildly in the air, while Rose was staring off into space, clearly not even paying attention. "Lily pushes me around, too. She thinks I should go work with her, in her greenhouse. Then I'd be indoors. But I've told her that I don't like working with plants, I like computer programming.

"She doesn't listen, and always says that I need to give gardening a chance. I don't know, maybe she's right."

Violet took Daisy's hand. "Well, you know what I think?"

"What?"

"I think you should do whatever makes you happy."


	7. Chapter 7

Violet found herself lost in thought as she rode the elevator up to the bridge. While the miniature crisis had eventually been resolved, the results had been less then satisfying. Rose was forced practically at gunpoint to finish the tree surveying, which she'd probably do badly just out of spite, and Daisy was dragged off to the greenhouse. When asked what she needed her little sister for, Lily had enigmatically replied that 'it's a secret.'

Whatever. At least she'd finished for good with all this sampling jazz, since that orange grove had luckily been the last area she needed to cover. Maybe the next assignment would be more interesting.

Auto was in standby near the front of the bridge, his customary position when he had nothing pressing to do. When he came out of his sleep mode with a series of clanks and whirs, Violet had to keep herself from shuddering. There was something so… _mechanical_ about the way he woke up.

He noiselessly glided up to her, and said, **"Please present the sampling device."**

Given that she had done this several times before, she did so without missing a beat. As she held out the gun-shaped tool, a scanning beam stabbed forth from his single, red eye, sweeping over the chamber that held the now-filled soil canisters. Auto beeped twice, and evidently contented with what he saw, pushed a catch on the side of the device. With a click, the container was released, and he caught it deftly.

The autopilot went over to the SDA console that had been seeing so much use lately, and opened the container with a snap. Then he began inserting each canister into a purpose-built receptacle on the console, one by one, while the computer beeped loudly to confirm the acquisition of each sample. After all the canisters were ready to be processed, he pressed a single button that simply read, 'Analyze.'

A cheerful female voice announced out of thin air, _"Analyzing samples... analysis complete." _The console's holoscreen came on with a flicker, displaying legions of facts and figures that Violet never got to catch a really good glimpse of, as Auto would read them so quickly that they appeared like a blur.

Seeming to find whatever he was looking for, he turned back to Violet and delicately lifted the soil sampler out of her hands. He then surprised her when instead of putting it back where it came from; he threw it down the trash chute. "What'd you do that for?" she exclaimed.

"**The Type 1 Soil Sampler is a single-use device. Thus, it had to be disposed of. Do you have any objections?"**

"Oh. No, when you put it that way, it makes sense. Seems kind of wasteful, though."

"**That is true."** Auto's processor trips circled his ocular. **"It might be wise to design a newer, more reusable model. Would you prefer that to be your next assignment, Violet?"**

"Gah, no! I'm no good with electronics." She squinted her eyes in thought. "Daisy might be able to do something like that though… Want me to ask her about that, Auto?"

"**Negative. It was only a passing notion, and has low priority amongst the tasks that need to be completed." **After this declaration, he went to the Com Console, and began dialing a number into it.

"Who're you calling, Auto?"

One of his spokes flicked. **"I am certain I have stated, multiple times, that I would prefer you did not call me Auto, EVE probe. As your superior, it would only be proper that you refer to me as sir."**

Violet rolled her eyes so hard that they looked like they were about to fall of her eyescreen. "Okay, _sir._ _Sir_, Who are you calling, _sir, _please, _sir_?"

"**Captain Bob McCrea. And I am not calling him, I am paging him. The message I am sending is a request for him to come to the bridge at his earliest convenience. I wish to inform him of the conclusions that I have drawn regarding the crop disparities."**

"Really? What've you found out?"

He ignored her, and typed out a brief note out. After doing so, he said, **"According to his datapad, he is currently located on the other side of the city, overseeing yet more restoration work. It is probable that he will not arrive here for several hours. I would suggest that while waiting, you remain in standby mode to save energy and processing power."**

Before Violet could say a word, he went back to the forward end of the bridge, and promptly deactivated himself.

Violet stared at the autopilot, speechless. If she had a mouth, it would have been gaping wide open. Instead, she had to settle with yelling at Auto. "I can't go to sleep yet, stupid. I'm not even tired! Am I just supposed to wait here for several hours, doing _nothing?_ "

Sadly, he didn't respond.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, Violet was fairly sure she was reaching the limit for how many times she could play _Solitaire _on her datapad without going insane, when it dinged. Lily was emailing her.

She opened up the message, and then grunted in irritation. Her sister was asking for help down at the greenhouse, supposedly something terrible had happened. Great, one thing after another.

Violet gave Auto a surreptitious look, who was still dead to the world. She could leave, fix whatever the problem was, and come back before he even noticed she was gone. Whatever the predicament Lily was in now, it shouldn't take more than maybe an hour to resolve. She had plenty of time.

* * *

A rising note played, entirely confined within Auto's consciousness. _Captain on bridge._

He turned on, and saw his superior walking out of the elevator. Zipping up next to the human, he said tonelessly, **"Good day, Captain. I trust that you are in good health?"**

McCrea smiled. "Same as ever, Auto. So, what's up?"

Idioms. Auto never understood the fascination humans had for those. **"Sir, are you aware of the issue regarding the discrepancy between projected and actual annual harvests?"** He prepared to launch himself into a long explanation, when much to his amazement McCrea nodded.

Thrown off his stride, Auto had to gather his thoughts for a moment. Fortunately, his computational speeds were so high that the delay would be unnoticeable to even a robot, let alone to the human eye. **"After 'Lily' brought this predicament to my attention, I have been investigating this matter. Violet, here, has been collecting soil samples for me to consider, in addition to the data Lily had already provided. Following my detailed analysis, I have succeeded in determining the reason for these low agricultural yields."** Auto paused, waiting for the captain to ask him what his conclusions were.

Instead, McCrea raised an eyebrow and said, "Violet, where?"

"**Excuse me, sir? Violet, or EVE probe 004, is currently located over th-"** He swiveled to look over to where she had been, only to be greeted by empty space. No wonder she had been so uncharacteristically quiet.

Auto was groping for something to say, when a something happened that gave him the fright of his, for the lack of a better word, life. In a manner unpleasantly reminiscent of an event that occurred shortly before the return to Earth, Violet rocketed out of the bridge's trash shot. Both man and even autopilot goggled at the white, egg-shaped robot.

With great aplomb, she saluted to the captain. "Sorry I'm late, sir. I had kind of a family emergency."

About to berate the probe for her unseemly behavior, Auto stopped himself when he saw his superior officer's face.

With a grin so wide that his head appeared like it was about to split right down the middle, McCrea said, "It's all right, Violet. I know how hard it is to deal with relatives as, uh, _unusual_ as yours are. Make yourself comfortable. Auto was about to explain why we've been having our crop problems."

Auto made an unhappy grinding noise with his servos. He decided to let the issue of Violet's unauthorized departure slide. For now.


	8. Chapter 8

_A/N_

_Arrrrgh. After much indecision, I've decided to merge this back into the main fic. If anyone thinks this screws up the story's flow, please speak up, okay?_

* * *

When Violet got the message from her sister EVE probe about her 'emergency,' she didn't feel the need to rush like a bat out of hell to the greenhouse. Lily always had a tendency to make mountains out of molehills, and she wasn't due for her conference with McCrea for a while yet.

So she was entirely unsurprised when she ran into Eve at the front door of the Lily's greenhouse. Lily was really calling in the heavy cavalry. Violet waved. "Hey! I guess you got the message about the, heh, emergency, too?"

Eve just looked at her funny. "What emergency?"

"You know, the one that Lily was all freaking out about. Right?"

With a shake of her head, Eve said, "No, I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about. Lily invited me to come over yesterday; she said she had a surprise for me."

"Oh. That's strange."

Suddenly, Lily burst through the door, cutting their conversation short. She caught sight of the two other 'bots, and hurriedly gestured for them to come inside. "Eve, Violet! It's very nice of you to visit!" As they filed in, Lily hissed into Violet's auditory receptor, "What took you so long?"

"I-"

"Nevermind. No time for explanations." While they floated in the entryway of the greenhouse, Lily said in a voice filled with false cheer, "So, Eve, how are things going with you and Wall-e? Still happily married?"

"Yes, of course. I'm still trying to convince Wall-e to move into a new house, though. He's awfully attached to that truck of his." Eve crossed her arms, and closely studied her sister. "Violet here said that you had a problem turn up, here at the greenhouse. Anything I can help with?"

"_What?_"When she spun around to give Violet a scorching glare, the robot could only stare back helplessly. Realizing that Violet had no idea about what was going on, Lily hurriedly said, "I mean, what are you talking about? She must be confused, all I asked was for her to come over so we could discuss some, uh, work related things. You probably wouldn't be interested. In fact, we need to pop off just to take care of that. Would you mind hanging around for a minute?"

"Oh, okay… I'll just wait here then."

"Great! Thanks, Eve." Lily then firmly took the younger EVE probe's hand in her own, and dragged her off at breakneck speed into the depths of the greenhouse. Violet put up with this until they were out of earshot, and then yelled, "What the hell is happening?!"

"Hold your horses, alright?" They came to a stop in front of a large, stone table. "There. See the problem?"

Violet looked from the table, to her sister, then back again. "Um… it's a table?"

"No, idiot." She put her head in her hands despairingly. "Does it seem the least bit familiar? Like, say, a table that would perhaps have something on it? Possibly a _plant?"_

"I don't really-" Then she remembered. "The Venus Flytrap. It's gone."

"Correct! The crowd goes wild!" She pantomimed clapping. "Now let's see if you can win the final round, double or nothing. Do you know what today is?"

"Friday?"

"Right, but also completely wrong. Too bad, but then again, Eve forgot too. It's our oldest sister's birthday." She pointed at the empty table. "And the flytrap that was there was going to be her surprise birthday present. But _someone_ snuck in here, and stole the thing FIFTEEN MINUTES before Eve showed up."

"Oh, _crud_. I can't believe I forgot Eve's birthday… Anyway, so you think Rose did it?"

Lily rolled her eyes. "Duh. She was probably pissed after I forced her to do the crop surveys again, and stole it just to ruin things. I checked our house, though, and the plant isn't there. She must've hid it somewhere else. But I can't go confront her, because I'm going to have to keep Eve distra-"

"Hey guys, what's going on? I heard raised voices."

The other two probes turned, flustered. Lily said, "Oh, nothing, nothing. I was, er, giving Violet this lovely granite table, thought she might like it. Yeah."

Eve eyeballed the table incredulously. "But there's no way that thing could fit in your house. It's way too big."

While Lily started to gabble excuses, digging herself into a deeper hole, Violet cut into the conversation. "Actually, what she meant is that she was going to give it to me, so that I could give it to Auto. Sort of a thank-you for hiring me as his assistant."

"What would an autopilot do with a stone table?"

Violet thought fast. "Uh… he really likes sculptures. Yeah, Captain Fee, um, had stone carving as a hobby, and he picked up an interest in it from her. I only found that out yesterday."

"Really?"

"I swear, that's the truth."

"Wow." Eve had a bemused expression on her eyescreen. "Never would have guessed Auto had an interest in art. I guess he can't be all that bad if he cares about something other than his work…"

"Yep, sure is amazing, isn't it," Lily interjected. "Now, if you don't mind, I thought I'd give you a tour of the greenhouse. You haven't been here for a while, and I've changed a couple things." When Eve agreed, Lily gently led her by the arm away from the table. As they went off, she said off-handedly over her back, "Violet, by the way, Daisy's in the security room. It might be a _really good idea_ if you went up to see her."

* * *

Just as Violet expected, Daisy was hunched over a console, typing furiously. Holoscreens were shimmering all over the wall of the room, many of them showing nothing but static. As the probebot typed, one by one each screen would flicker, and then begin displaying security footage again. It would only be a few minutes before the closed circuit camera system was back online.

Violet gave a little buzz to her vocoder, and said, "Hi."

Daisy threw her a curveball when, instead of jumping nearly out of her frame like she usually did, she merely nodded. "Hi, Violet. Saw you come in on the SecCam #7. Wait a minute, I'm almost done." With a few more key presses, the last camera reactivated. With her eyes upturned in a smile, Daisy straightened and said, "Good to see you. Rose was cleverer then I thought, she managed to disable the whole security network."

"How'd she do that?"

"I have several theories, but my main one is that she managed to get her hands on a security override code. Darned if I know how she'd do something like that, since they only assign those to stewards." She shrugged. "At least it's an idea. Give me a little while, and I can decrypt it. Then I can trace the code, and see if it's been used anywhere else."

"Okay. While you do that, I'm going to have a talk with our sister. Maybe I can persuade her to cough up the plant's location." Violet flexed her fingers contemplatively.

"Go right on ahead. You might want to check out the citrus plot down south, where we left her earlier. She probably went back to her surveying, after she took the flytrap."

* * *

EVE probe 002 violently poked Violet with a finger. "And I'm telling you again, mud-for-brains, _I don't know what you're talking about!_"

"Mud-for-brains?"

"Yeah, mud-for-brains." Rose snorted. "Like you have a bunch of old silicon chips knocking around in your head, instead of a decent q-puter."

Violet narrowed her eyes. "Let's cut the crap, alright? Will you, or will you not, tell me where you hid Lily's flytrap?"

In response, Rose made an incredibly obscene gesture.

"I'll take that as a no." With a chuckle, she said, "You're lucky Auto isn't still in charge, Rose. He'd have stamped you as a defective after meeting you in thirty seconds. Flat."

"Violet, honey, he'd do the exact same thing to you." Rose waved at the tree she had been assaying before she had been interrupted. "Would you mind letting me get back to work? You've taken up enough of my _precious_ surveying time."

* * *

Daisy looked up from her datapad, and said sympathetically, "Didn't go well?"

"That's an understatement. How about you? Any luck?"

"In fact, yes." She handed the datapad over to Violet. On it was a map that Violet vaguely recognized. A storage area, somewhere? "I was right, it's a security code. And, get this, the next place it was used after knocking out our camera network, was on a storage locker in the _Axiom._"

"That means… jackpot!" Violet said, pumping a fist. "What are we waiting for? Let's go!"

Drumming her fingers on a nearby console, Daisy said nervously, "Oh, um, actually, I need to stay here. There are few things I need to take care of. With the computers, you know."

_Still scared of even being in the same ship as Auto, I see._ Violet cocked her head. "You sure?"

"Yeah. Go on ahead, you'll be fine without me."

* * *

With the help of Daisy's trusty datapad, it only took her a short while to find the cargo area she was hunting for. Keying in the very same code Rose must have used, the door glided open noiselessly. Inside was the Venus Flytrap, looking a bit worse for wear.

She went in, and as the door closed behind her, she began looking the locker over for any clues. Unlike a mystery novel, there were none. Disappointing.

The weirdest part was how the flytrap was sitting inside the room. The door would have barely have been wide enough for the plant, let alone a MV-R hovercart. How the heck did Rose get it through the door? There was no way an EVE probe could have handled something of that size on her own.

Then the aforementioned door slid open yet again. She glanced up, startled, only to came face-to-face with a SECUR-T 'bot. She was about to say something, when he let out a blare from his siren and zoomed off down the hallway.

_Why would a steward steal a plant_? She only paused for a microsecond to consider how utterly bizarre the situation was, before she took off after him.

With her superior speed, it was not very difficult for her to catch up with the rogue robot, despite him running his gravitonic propulsors flat-out.

The SECUR-T unit must have realized this, as he started taking random turns down the endless hallways, obviously hoping to lose her, or at least get her to crash into a wall. This proved to be his downfall, as he eventually turned onto a dead end.

Violet readied her plasma gun in case this turned ugly, and said, "Give up. It's over."

The other robot stared at her expressionlessly, as only the faceless SECUR-T 'bots could. Then, without a word, he hopped down a nearby trash chute. Violet cursed, and without another choice presenting itself, was forced to follow him.

It was a long fall, but not as bad as Wall-e's must have been when he got tossed down the chute from the bridge. The _Axiom's_ storage bays were closer to the disposal areas, after all.

She didn't even have to suffer a hard landing. As soon as she exited the chute, she re-activated her gravitonic thrusters, and began looking for that pesky robot. She quickly found him, as he was picking his way through the still mountainous piles of garbage.

Violet flew down to where he was, and let fly a plasma bolt. It soared past him, and vaporized an unlucky heap of trash. He froze. She shouted, "Surrender! There's no need to act like this, it was just a friggin' plant!"

The SECUR-T 'bot very carefully turned to face her, and said sadly, "No. I'm afraid it really wasn't about the plant at all."

Still keeping her gun trained on him, Violet floated up to the steward. "Well then, Mister Know-It-All- what _is_ it about, then?"

Drooping slightly, he said, "Um… you wouldn't happen to recognize me, would you?"

"No, I-" Violet's eyes widened, and she deactivated her plasma gun. "Sam? You're Rose's supervisor, aren't you?"

"Er, yes."

"Why would you steal something from Lily like that?"

There was no response.

"Well?"

He said, in a very small voice, "I was trying to impress Rose."

"I'm sorry? You wanted to… oh. You're interested in her, aren't you?" Despite herself, Violet couldn't keep from bursting out laughing. "You do know that she hates stewards, right? She thinks they're all just a bunch of Auto's cat's paws."

"I know. I thought that maybe if I did something like this, she'd be impressed. Rose had indicated, before she left my workplace, that she felt frustrated with her sisters. Stealing Lily's prized plant would have shown her that I am not merely a rigid SECUR-T unit." Sam tipped slightly, in imitation of a bow. "Apologies."

Violet bowed gracefully in return. "Accepted, if you promise me something."

"Anything within my power, miss."

"You'll return Lily's Venus Flytrap to its greenhouse immediately. Okay?" Sam beeped to the affirmative, and rapidly hovered over to a nearby service elevator that would go back up to the cargo decks of the _Axiom_. Violet was about to join him, when she idly checked the time. Nearly two hours had passed; she was going to be late for the meeting with McCrea!

Violet was beginning to panic, certain that there was no way she could get to the bridge in time, when she got an idea. Looking up at the many openings above her, she searched her memory banks. One of those had to lead up there. Then her trusty internal map of the _Axiom_ helpfully highlighted the correct shaft.

Soaring up to the garbage chute, she shouted, "Ready or not, Auto, here I come!"


	9. Chapter 9

"…**while I suspected that the low yields were due to a lack of nitrates in the soil, this hypothesis was disproved when I reviewed the samples that Violet provided. After analysis, I determined that sufficient quantities of nitrogen and nitrogen fixing bacteria were present in all areas tested.**

"**The next essential nutrient I investigated that, if in low enough quantities, could impede plant growth was phosphorus, commonly found in the natural environment as a component of phosphate. I conducted another battery of tests with the soil samples, but was unable to find any significant correlation between the levels of phosphate in the different plots and crop yields…"**

The autopilot had been droning on for ages. While Violet had been desperately trying to pay attention the entire time, despite the excruciating level of detail he was going into, she finally had enough. The final straw was when McCrea, seated on a chair that she had brought in for him to sit on, began nodding off.

"Auto?"

He paused in the middle of his lecture, and said, **"Violet. Please do not interrupt. I am relaying important information to our superior officer."**

"Yeah, well…" She rubbed the back of her head. "Wouldn't it be more _efficient_ if you gave Captain McCrea a brief summary now, and then presented him with a written copy for him to read on his own time? That way, you wouldn't have to waste time giving a verbal report."

Auto mulled over her suggestion, and then inclined slightly. **"You are correct, I commend your judgment. Do you agree to Violet's proposal, Captain?"**

McCrea jolted back to wakefulness, and let out a mighty yawn. "What? Oh, sure. Good idea, Violet."

"**It is agreed, then. Very well."** Auto pushed and held a button on the SDA console, causing the slideshow on the holoscreen behind him to flash madly through a succession of images, before it settled on a picture of the root system of a stalk of wheat. The diagram suddenly ballooned to fill the screen, focusing in on a single root section. Labels flashed into existence around the plant, with enigmatic labels such as 'pericycle,' 'apical meristem,' and 'endodermis.' One bulbous structure, which was circled in red several times, was labeled 'endomycorrhiza.'

With a tap of a button that caused the marked root part to flash, Auto said, **"That is what was missing, sir."**

McCrea got up out of his chair, and peered at the slide. "End-o-my-co-rhi-za? What's that?"

Rather than explaining, the autopilot said simply, **"Computer. Define mycorrhiza."**

_A __**mycorrhiza**__ is a symbiotic, or occasionally weakly pathogenic, association between a __fungus__ and the roots of a __plant__. In a mycorrhizal association the fungus may colonize the roots of a host plant either intracellularly, where it is referred to as endomycorrhiza, or extracellularly, where it is called ectomycorrhiza._

_These relationships are an important component of soil life, and ninety-five percent of all living plants are mycorrhizal. Without the presence of these useful fungi that aid in the absorption of essential nutrients and minerals, most plants will perform poorly._

When the computer finished speaking, Auto said, **"While your community has performed adequately up until now, and your EVE probe Lily has shown exceptional resourcefulness in performing as a resident agronomist, she is hampered by her extreme focus on the science of botany. I doubt that it occurred to her that the field of mycology could provide some insight into the colony's problems."**

"What's the next step, then?"

"**I have already taken it, sir. I have instructed the on-board organic synthesis manufactories to re-create spores of several of the common species of fungi that lived symbiotically with your major food crops."** Auto consulted an internal timer. **"They should be ready for distribution in 327 minutes, sir, due to their low genetic complexity."**

"Great!" McCrea smiled, and reached up to give the autopilot a friendly pat. "You did really well, Auto. Thank you."

Auto inched away a bit, uncomfortable with this sudden display of affection. **"Ah, you are welcome captain. However, I was merely performing my duty."**

Violet held up a hand, getting his attention. "With respect, sir, that's a load of crap," she interjected. "You have no idea of what you've done. With this problem fixed, this'll take a lot of pressure off of our food stores. We've been living pretty close to the knife, from what I've heard."

"**Yes. Thank you for your input, EVE probe."** The autopilot changed the subject. **"Are there any other matters you wish to cover, while you are here, Captain?"**

McCrea stared up at the ceiling, frowning. Then his gaze snapped back to Auto. "Actually, there is. I've wanted to do this for a long, long, time." He took a deep breath. "I would like to contact the other ships."

"**Impossible, sir."**

"How's it impossible? I know that you used to have those yearly pow-wows with the other autopilots. I would have done it myself, years ago, if the darned quantum transceiver didn't jabber some gobbledygook about a 'Number 15A General Operation Error.' I figured that you must be the only one who can use the stupid thing."

"**Incorrect, captain,"** Auto said calmly. **"A 15A GOE is, bluntly, when there is insufficient power to run the quantum transceiver."**

"What d'you mean, insufficient power? We have loads of the stuff!" McCrea squinted at the wheel-shaped 'bot. "Don't we?"

"**Not enough for our purposes."** Auto's processor strips swung idly from side to side, as he thought of the best way to explain the matter. **"Captain, have you heard the theory of how the universe is like a rubber sheet, with lead weights placed upon it?"**

"Yeah, that's the one where planets and stuff make these big dents in space, right?"

Once again, Auto was struck by how much more knowledgeable this captain was, compared the one he knew ten years ago. **"Correct. When we communicate with the other ships, both sender and receiver are on a level playing field. Transmissions may be sent easily and quickly. However, we are currently located in a gravity 'well.' In order to force the signal over the edge of our indentation, massive amounts of energy must be consumed. More than the amounts provided by the **_**Axiom's**_** fusion reactors."**

McCrea was about to accept what Auto had said, when he remembered something from an old holodrama he used to watch. "But people on Earth could use q-ceivers all the time to talk to each other. You can't be saying that one person needed a whole power plant to himself just to give someone a call!"

Auto said diffidently, **"That is true, but both callers were located inside the gravity well. They were not attempting to contact someone from outside of it."**

"Oh." The captain sucked on a tooth, trying to think of another solution. "Well… since the problem is the Earth's gravity… Couldn't we shoot the _Axiom_ back into space?"

"**Definitely **_**not,**_** sir. The ship has not been properly maintained for a decade. Unless you are willing to pull all available robot and human taskforces from their assigned duties for several months, so that they could ready the **_**Axiom**_** for launch, we cannot even contemplate that as an option."**

McCrea said, exhaling angrily, "Dammit! Okay, so what's that leave us?"

"**The only choice available is to activate one of the defunct power plants in the city."** Auto went silent, as he searched his internal databases. **"There is a decommissioned research facility nearby. According to my records, it had a viable fusion power plant that was mothballed, but not disassembled. Only a single technician would be needed to reactivate it, as the process would be entirely automated."**

As one, both man and autopilot turned to stare at Violet, who had been quiet for most of their exchange. She sighed. Why was her fate always to be the designated gofer?


	10. Chapter 10

**BNL TECHNICAL RESEARCH DIVISION 130 – LAB 29**

Violet gave the corroded metal sign one last look, and then went into the building with some trepidation. Luckily, whoever had last exited the lab had forgotten to shut the reinforced steel door behind him. With the condition the building was in, it would have likely taken explosives to make an entrance. Due to the ravages of time, the door had rusted into immobility.

The situation inside was not much better. Sad remnants of office furniture lay everywhere, along with the omnipresent trash that still choked the city, despite the colony's best efforts.

Along one wall of the lobby was a grime-streaked directory. After studying it, she was able to find the location of the fusion power-plant, which was helpfully marked on the map with a lightning bolt symbol.

As she hovered through the darkened hallways, her finely attuned hearing could pick up the soft scuttling of hundreds of cockroaches. The probebot shuddered. While Violet knew how much Wall-e and Eve liked their pet cockroach, Hal, she could never bring herself to enjoy the company of, well, an insect.

When she got further into the facility, the meager light that had been provided by the few shattered windows began to fade. Soon the level of illumination dropped to levels making it impossible for her to see, even with her night-vision capabilities. Violet reached into her storage compartment, and fished out a battery-powered flashlight that she had brought, 'just in case.'

She was near the very center of the facility, sweeping her light from side to side across the hallway when she came across something that piqued her curiosity. At first glance, it was another nondescript metal door. However, unlike all the other entryways, which were all either unlocked or left wide open, this one was closed securely.

Violet pulled on the side of the door, and to her surprise, felt a little give. That meant that the door wasn't stuck shut, and would probably open easily once she had restored power to its motion detector. She made a mental note of the location she found it at, so that she could inform her superiors of it later.

Happily, the fusion generator's control room was only five minutes away. And like Auto had said, it only took her a few minutes to start it up. She just had to follow the instructions he had given her.

As the tokamak started up, she heard a few loud _pops_. She thought that some fuses must have blown, when then the overhead lights came on with a flicker. Violet stuck her head out of the control room, and saw the rest of the hallway do likewise.

She turned off her flashlight, and began the trek back out of the lab. After she passed by the sealed doorway, she stopped. Above the door was a sign that glowed cheerily.

It read: **Experiment in Progress**

The robot debated with herself whether to investigate or not. In the end, her inherent curiosity won out. It wouldn't hurt to only take a look, after all.

Violet floated up to the motion sensor, which flickered when it registered her presence. The door glided open, and she went in.

Unlike all the other rooms she had seen, this one still had some laboratory apparatus left. At first, she wondered why it hadn't been moved out like everything else of value had been, but as she inspected the equipment, the reason for this became obvious.

The stuff was all too massive to move. Especially what seemed to be the centerpiece of the operation, a thick metal sheet two meters square. The surface of it was criss-crossed with what, under closer examination, appeared to be thousands of quantum microcircuits. Cables as thick as her head led from the slab to a series of hulking machines which served some indeterminate purpose.

She examined the devices, but they proved reluctant to reveal their secrets. They were clearly experimental prototypes of some sort, as they had no documentation, or even labels.

Finally, she thought she had struck gold when she found a console hidden amongst the forest of scientific paraphernalia. Her initial elation faded, however, when the buttons on it proved just as mysterious as the rest of the room. Even after a few cautious key presses, nothing appeared to happen.

At wits end, she decided to inspect the weird plate of metal one last time. Maybe she had missed something? As she moved over it, suddenly four bluish restriction fields sputtered into existence around her, trapping her on the slab.

She first pounded her fists, and even fired her plasma gun at the fields, to no avail. Then, with a _crack_ and a blinding flash of energy, she was transported somewhere else…

* * *

Darkness. That was the first thing that registered. Violet groped for her flashlight, and flicked it on.

The sight that greeted her was not too unlike from the previous one. Another lab, cleaner perhaps, but just as Spartan.

Even the door leading out looked identical. She flew up to it, hoping for an easy escape, only to be sorely disappointed when it refused to open.

Violet turned back around, and played her light over the room, desperately wishing for there to be anything else that could help her. Just when she was about to conclude that the only way to escape would be through the use of brute force, her prayers were answered.

In the corner was a computer terminal, resembling the type found scattered throughout the _Axiom._ Inscribed on the side was an unfamiliar logo, consisting of a series of cog wheels, and the words DEEP THIRTEEN.

Giving a sigh of relief, she approached the workstation and keyed in her id code and password. With any luck she could figure out what was going on.

**ACCESS DENIED.**

She tried again.

**ACCESS DENIED.**

The EVE probe slammed her fist in frustration onto the keyboard, which cracked. Then the screen flickered.

**Command Override #037… Partial Access Granted.**

There was a long, low buzz, and a camera unfolded itself, snakelike, from within the bowels of the computer. The lens was a deep, dark blue, and it clicked as it focused on her.

Several more strings of text flashed onto the holoscreen.

**Establishing Commlink: Node Number Beta3…**

**Commlink Established.**

**Sender ID: GRAD-E_UNIT01**

**Recipient ID: TERMINAL_013228**

.

**who are you?**


	11. Chapter 11

_A/N  
_

_I apologize about the formatting. If anyone has difficulty reading this chapter, I suggest going over to the Wall-e forum at walleforumdotcom/indexdotphp?topic=3549.0 to read it.  
_

* * *

The 'bot floated motionlessly for a moment, stunned, before she cautiously typed a single sentence.

_My name is Violet._

**searching… no such individual found in database.**

The camera lens whirred, and a bright blue scanning beam shot out, and swept over her body.

**you are incorrect. your designation is eve probe 004, currently assigned to the **_**axiom.**_** why are you here?**

_Not sure. I was assigned to restart the fusion power plant in TechDiv 130, Lab 29, when I discovered some kind of teleportation device. After activating it, I found myself transported here._

She paused a moment or two, thinking.

_If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you the same two questions. Who are you, and why are you here?_

The screen abruptly shifted, displaying the image of a darkened, cavernous room. Most of it was taken up by an array of what she slowly realized were a series of quantum supercomputers, their LEDs hypnotically flashing. In the center of the area, illuminated by a solitary shaft of light was an immense terminal that more resembled a podium, or an altar. Along with the Deep 13 logo, there was also an acronym stenciled below it: GRAD-E.

The picture vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

**i am grad-e unit 001, a general research assistant and data evaluator. my model is one of only two certified fully sentient artificial intelligences, the other of which is the automated unitary task organizer model autopilot.**

**my directive is twofold. first, i administrate the deep 13 subterranean semi-automated research and production facility, aiding in the collation and discovery of scientific information in order to push back the farthest boundaries of knowledge.**

Once again, the screen changed, briefly showing the familiar three-leafed plant symbol of Operation Recolonize.

**in addition, i directed the latter phases of operation clean-up. i was also to organize and manage the efforts behind operation re-colonize, before its untimely cancellation.**

_Fascinating. But why didn't they pack you up when they left Earth, like they did with everything else, GRAD-E?_

When five minutes passed, and there was no answer, Violet started to get worried. Had she broken the computer, somehow?

Then, a response.

**not everyone wished to leave earth. were you aware of that fact, eve probe?**

_No, not exactly._

A new photograph popped up, this time of a group of masked men, wielding rifles. They were firing wildly into a cluster of cowering lab-coat wearing scientists.

**these individuals, belonging to a group calling itself the terran freedom fighters, successfully assaulted numerous bnl facilities.**

**despite the forced departure of many of their associates on board the bnl starliner fleet, a few members managed to stay behind. in a well-coordinated raid, they assaulted the heart of the cleanup effort, deep 13.**

A different scene replaced the earlier one, showing squads of armored BnL troopers crouched behind a makeshift barricade, along with some robots that resembled SECUR-T units. Instead of being the stewards' familiar white and gray, however, these 'bots were painted jet black. On each one was a simple label, ENFRC-R.

Together with the soldiers, several of the ENFRC-Rs were already shooting at shadowy, camouflage clad figures. They apparently had built-in lasguns.

**while the intruders were repelled from the most restricted areas, our security forces were only able to confine them to the residential zones. and unfortunately, the defensive protocols that had been activated as a result of their incursion made it impossible to continue my mission with any degree of efficiency. president shelby forthright made multiple attempts to flush out the fanatics, none of which succeeded. as a result, this led to the complete failure of operation cleanup.**

_What happened then?_

**the president abandoned the facility, leaving the tff soldiers trapped within the complex. after two years, they committed suicide once they realized that their actions directly led to the death of their only planet.**

_Wow, brutal. Thanks for the telling me your story._

**it was my pleasure, eve probe 004.**

Violet drummed her fingers on the keyboard, vaguely noticing the sensation that something GRAD-E had said slipped past her. Ah.

_Earlier, you stated that you were one of only two types of sentient AIs._

**correct.**

_But I'm sentient!_

**negative. while eve probes display some semi-sentient capabilities, they do not display true self awareness.**

_Well, that too. I'm self-aware._

**interesting. is this phenomenon restricted only to yourself?**

_No, thousands of other 'bots are just like me. Even a WALL-E unit._

There was another pause.

**this topic will require further study. thank you for informing me of this matter.**

Violet giggled.

_You're welcome. By the way, can you reactivate the teleporter? I really liked talking to you, but I've got to go…_

**apologies. it is currently impossible for you to leave.**

_Excuse me?_

**due to the defensive protocols that have been activated, all traffic in and out of the facility is prohibited.**

She rolled her eyes. Great, another literal-minded 'bot. Or computer, rather.

_I don't really see what the problem is. Can't you deactivate them?_

**negative. only the global ceo of buy n large has the authority to do that.**

_Why??_

**that was decided upon as the best course of action, as deep 13 is the most valuable facility on earth.**

_Argh. Well, can't you just, I don't know, pretend I'm not here? Then I could sneak out without you even noticing. After all, you haven't even tried to attack me yet, so you have to be doing that already._

**sadly, i have no control over security measures. that is under the purview of the defensive tactical intelligence computer, or d-tic. ****i have merely been failing to inform it of your presence.**

Violet felt like she was going to scream.

_So I'm trapped in this lab?!_

**technically speaking, you are not in a laboratory. you are in bnl teleportation hub alpha, on floor b1. the lab complexes are fifty nine levels below this one.**

**in any case, you are not 'trapped' in this room. despite the lockdown, i still possess enough authority to open all doors within the facility.**

_That still doesn't give me a way out. Or… wait a minute… you said that the D-TIC computer controls the defenses, right?_

**yes.**

_What if I disabled it?_

**according to deep 13 procedure, i would assume d-tic unit's duties on a temporary basis.**

Her eyes upturned in a smile. She was getting somewhere!

_Could you deactivate the security systems, then?_

**yes. however, that would be no easy task.**

Or maybe she wasn't.

_What is it this time?_

**most of the interior passageways you would have to take to reach d-tic unit 001's location are blocked off by emergency restriction fields. only security personnel can deactivate them.**

_So I'm back where I started._

**negative.**

Thoroughly confused, Violet watched as a map materialized onscreen. An icon with her face on it marked her current location, in addition to a large X at a room only a relatively short distance away.

**at this storage locker, a spare special-purpose type-y defensive robot is located. it is equipped with a standard bnl security iff transponder. if you follow my instructions, you could activate and reprogram it to help turn off the restriction fields, thus giving you access to the entire facility.**

**including the d-tic unit.**


	12. Chapter 12

Despite the apparent proximity of the storage locker to the spot where she had arrived, in reality it took a long time for her to get there. A long, long time.

The first reason for this was the existence of the restriction fields she needed to turn off. Instead of being able to go straight for the SPYD-R robot, she had to take a meandering path through several sets of service corridors.

One advantage of doing this, though, was that there were far fewer ENFRC-R patrols in these sections of the base. According to GRAD-E, they would be hostile to her. She didn't possess the proper clearance.

On the other hand, there was a problem with this approach. Numerous security measures were scattered throughout the passageways she was using, obviously to make up for the reduced guard presence. And if she set one of them off, well, that would be that. She'd have the entire robot population of Deep 13 coming down on her head.

Fortunately, the supercomputer was able to help her out with this problem. After retuning her internal radio transmitter to his personal broadcasting frequency, she was able to stay in constant communication with him without having to consult a terminal. This allowed him to point out any dangers that she was unaware of.

The main things she had to deal with, so far, were laser tripwires and infrared motion detectors. While the latter were perfectly harmless, due to her not having human body temperature, the laser sensors proved a bit of a problem. At least, until she got the idea of having GRAD-E transmit her visual overlays that would garishly highlight the beams red. It then was simply a matter of exploiting the fact that whoever the designers were, they wouldn't have been expecting an intruder less than a meter tall, and able to fly to boot.

Before she knew it, she was almost where she needed to be. But then she hit a small snag.

For reasons known only to D-TIC, a securitybot was stationed right in a stock room she had to pass through to reach the locker she needed.

**to proceed, you will have to destroy that enfrc-r unit, probe 004.**

She slumped slightly. _I know, it's just… I've never killed someone before…_

**why are you concerned? it would destroy you without a thought.**

_Yeah, but that 'bot is still a living, thinking being…_

**ah. there, you are wrong. regardless of how the enemies you encounter may appear, you must remember that under priority one counter-insurgency defense protocols, all security forces are under direct control of d-tic unit 001. there is no chance of them being self aware. **

_They have the capability, though, don't they?_

**yes, they have the **_**potential**_**, perhaps, but that is merely an abstraction. can their potential be determined, calculated, and recorded? no, it is inherently unmeasurable, and thus irrelevant.**

**as of now, that security robot is as sentient as a rock. agonizing over the possible future state of its consciousness is a fruitless endeavor.**

**now, dispose of it, eve probe 004. enough time has been wasted, as it is.**

_I… OK._ She armed her plasma gun, and began to creep up on the ENFRC-R. It was facing away from her, completely oblivious to her presence. As she got closer, she idly noticed one of the ubiquitous security cameras unfold from the ceiling, GRAD-E evidently wanting to see what was going to happen through a source other than her own eyes.

She trained the gun precisely where GRAD-E had told her the other robots' radio transmitter was located, hoping to destroy it to prevent an alarm from being raised, and fired.

The bolt of plasma sailed towards the ENFRC-R, and struck true. The security 'bot rocked back, shuddering under the unexpected assault. But it was a sturdy machine, and wasn't down for the count. Two ports opened on its midsection, deploying lasgun barrels, and it began firing madly at Violet.

She easily dodged the badly aimed lasbolts, and with a few more shots the ENFRC-R was reduced to a couple pieces of twisted scrap metal.

**well done. Proceed to storage unit number 11, please.**

Violet tore her gaze from the remains of a fellow robot, and went on to the locker, a few meters beyond where the sentry had been.

GRAD-E opened the door for her, and she went in. Inside, a plethora of crates on pallets greeted her, stacked to the ceiling. The supercomputer directed her to one of them, and she opened it. Inside was a perfectly smooth, cylindrical object, apparently made of the same white material as she was. Violet removed it, and placed it on the floor.

**to activate the spyd-r unit, start by entering this sixty-four character alpha-numeric boot code into the number pad located on the side proximal to yourself…** He rattled off a series of numbers and letters, and the probe entered them.

Nothing happened.

**hmm. try again.**

She complied, but there was no noticeable effect.

**i see. the internal powerpack is completely discharged. please depress the battery quick-release catch, located opposite the number pad.**

With a click, a cube fell out. It had a BnL logo on it, and a label that read 'S-8 Energy Microcell.'

**you will need to take this to a standard bnl charge station. but there is another complication. all on-site charge stations are-**

_Under lockdown, right?_

**yes. you will need to leave the main facility for the auxiliary coal mine and processing plant. according to my inventory manifests, there should be some free-standing charge stations that have not been restricted to security personnel located there.**

_Auxiliary… so will there be as many patrols there? Or tripwires?_

**correct. there will, however, be an excess of automated explosive devices.**

Violet stared blankly ahead, at the wall.

**land mines, eve probe.**

**

* * *

**

_Puh-loink!_

With hardly a moment to spare, Violet dived behind a rock outcropping. The R-19 AP mine, or 'Bouncing Betty' as GRAD-E said it was called by the BnL Security Forces, leaped up into the air. Then it exploded, showering fragments of red-hot shrapnel everywhere.

The white 'bot peeked out to check if it was safe, and then cautiously continued down the mine shaft. This was _worse_ than the lasers. While it was slow going, earlier, she had been reasonably safe. Here, she had to always be on the lookout, to prevent getting blown to bits.

When she passed by the umpteenth defunct automated miner, a gigantic vehicle almost the size of WALL-E's truck, she paused for a second.

_I wonder how well that thing is armored?_

_

* * *

_

_Poink! Poink! Poink! Poink!_

Violet cackled manically as the auto-miner chugged and snarled its way over the Bouncing Betties, shrugging off their feeble explosions. Yeah, it moved all of seven kilometers per hour, but this sure beat having to pick your way through what was essentially a gauntlet of explosives.

Then she became aware of a faint voice in the back of her mind.

**eve probe. eve probe. respond, eve probe!**

_Whoops, sorry. What is it, GRAD-E?_

**you are at automated processing station 023. there should be a powerpack charger located here.**

_Aw, already?_ Reluctantly, she turned off the miner, and climbed out.

Amidst machinery that GRAD-E said washed coal, which she really didn't understand, there was something she had seen many times on board the _Axiom._ A BnL charge station, coated liberally with fine, black coal dust.

She only had to slip the SPYD-R's powerpack in, wait a minute, and the battery was fully juiced up.

Much to her disappointment, she didn't get to ride the auto-miner back. GRAD-E adamantly refused, saying that she had drawn enough unwanted attention to herself for the day.


	13. Chapter 13

The powerpack made a smooth-sounding _snick_ as Violet slid it in. After checking to see if the battery was properly hooked up, she typed the boot code GRAD-E had given her.

For a second, when it didn't do anything, she thought something had gone wrong. Again. But then with a hiss, the cylinder split down the middle and fell apart, revealing an odd looking robot.

At first, it looked like it was just a big oval-shaped head, with a series of black markings spaced evenly on its lower end. But then six, well, _spidery_ legs folded out from the dark sections on the robots' body, and it stood up. Its eyescreen activated, and after blinking a few times, it looked curiously at Violet.

She backed away from the 'bot, feeling more than a little nervous. "Uh… hi?"

The SPYD-R unit chirped in response. Then it flicked on a bright blue beam, and scanned her from head to gravitonic impeller. It let out two more chirps, and then said, "Dwoot!"

Deciding that she had no idea what was going, Violet turned to the one person who could help her out. _GRAD-E? What just happened?_

**the spyd-r unit was running its imprinting program.**

_Imprinting?_

**yes. the type y defense robot is designed for assignment to a single person. the boot sequence you entered instructed it to run an imprinting program upon the first being that speaks to it. that being was you.**

**it is armed with a hn-20 needler gun, which it will use to protect you to the best of its abilities. It is also able to follow any commands given by radio, in machine-code, or in normal speech.**

_Cool._ She gave it a pat on the head, and it warbled contentedly. "I think I'll call you Spidey."

* * *

They were in front of the remnants of a large blast door, heavily scarred by both small arms and heavy weaponry, the latter having holed it numerous times. It still proved an effective barrier, however, since the restriction field generators built into the frame continued to project a nearly impossible to pass wall of energy.

Violet gave her new pet a nudge. "Okay, Spidey. Do your thing."

With a chirrup, the 'bot walked forward to the field, and made a complex sounding set of beeps. The field emitters chimed twice, and turned off. GRAD-E soon followed suit, and opened the door for the two of them.

"Wow, thanks!"

**you are welcome.**

"Sorry, I was actually talking to Spidey. Good Spidey!" Violet gave its frame an affectionate rub, and it wiggled with joy. "Good, uh… spider robot?"

**it is not a 'spider robot.' it is a special purpose typ-**

The probebot waved a hand absent-mindedly. "Whatever, GRAD-E." Then she straightened up, and walked through the now clear doorway, Spidey following close behind her.

When she passed through, Violet gasped. The room was _enormous. _She heard GRAD-E softly whisper inside of her.

**welcome to the grand lobby of deep thirteen. it is designed to fit up to ten thousand occupants, both robotic and human. originally designed by will boyd wright, numerous managerial functions and events have been held here. built by a team of one thousand construction robots, it was first inaugurated by shelby forthright on…**

As he continued to drone on, Violet began to tune him out. She floated along, constantly turning her head, as she drank in the surroundings. Even under the dull red glow of the facility's emergency lighting, and the scattered detritus from what must have been an epic battle, there was something majestic about the way the room looked. All minimalist sweeping lines and curves, form _always_ mixed with function. Everything from the currently darkened holoscreen emitters to the long information desk were integrated seamlessly into the 'flow' of the lobby.

While working her way through the reception area, Violet was having a hard time putting a finger on why she was so thoroughly enjoying the décor. Then it dawned on her.

It reminded her of the _Axiom_.

Her heart twisted. For the entire time she was down here, she had completely forgotten about the people back home, not to mention the job she was supposed to be doing. Her sisters were probably worried sick about her. In fact, though she hated to admit it, she even missed that stupid autopilot.

Violet was jolted out of her reverie when she felt someone tapping her on the back. She spun around, trying to shake the mental cobwebs out of her mind.

It was Spidey. "Dwoot?"

"What is it?"

The robot pointed with one of its legs, off to the room's main exit. Dimly, she noticed that GRAD-E had fallen silent.

Then she saw what Spidey was all wound up about. They had company, a whole lot of company. About a dozen hulking bipedal robots, all standing in a line. Violet charged up her gun, only to be interrupted by a voice.

**stop.**

As she lined up her gunsight, she said through her radio, _If you can't see, GRAD-E, I'm a kinda busy right now…_

**before you shoot, tell me: do you notice anything odd about those security robots?**

_They're really big and mean looking, and are probably loaded with nasty weapons?_

**they are facing **_**away**_** from you. which means that they are currently not aware of your presence. i would suggest that you keep this state of affairs in motion.**

_Oh._ Sure enough, they _were_ all facing away from here. She disarmed the plasma gun. _What are they doing?_

**guarding.**

_Guarding against what?_

**intruders. **Before she could scream, the supercomputer continued. **that doorway leads into the residence life area, consisting of deep thirteen's dormitories, cafeteria, and other amenities. when the tff fighters assaulted the base, they were eventually confined to that section.**

Violet cocked her head. _I thought you said they were all dead. The TFF people, I mean._

**yes, i witnessed that, as did d-tic unit 001. but according to procedure, elimination of the threat must be confirmed by an assault team before the local defensive units may be reassigned. **

_Why doesn't D-TIC send in those 'bots to do the confirmation stuff, then?_

**robots are not allowed to participate in urban assaults, due to possible damage to innocent bystanders. only specially trained humans are allowed to. and as the last of those types of human left earth well before the suspected deaths of the defenders…**

_I get the picture now._ She glanced at the motionless 'bots. _Are they dangerous?_

**no.**

_That's a rel-_

**they are **_**extremely**_** dangerous. the mark one guar-d-n model security robot is armed and armored with a plasma quick-fire cannon, multilaser gun, and a type three energy shield. the lone weak point are its optical equipment, which can only be damaged by an enormously lucky shot. this design error was to be fixed in the second iteration, which was cancelled due to the abandonment of operation cleanup. **

_Okay. So how do I get past them?_

**you do not need to. as i already informed you earlier, you do not need to enter the residence life sector to complete your objective. please turn thirty degrees clockwise.**

She did so, coming face-to-face with an entrance that she had completely overlooked. Above it was a sign.

DEEP 13 DEPARTMENT OF SECURITY


	14. Chapter 14

Those darned ENFRC-R 'bots were _everywhere_. She'd get a few meters further into the Security sector, and then have to hide because another patrol was passing by. At least GRAD-E was watching them with his security cameras, and could tell her when a securitybot was getting too close for comfort.

The one good thing was that she didn't have to figure out how to hide Spidey. With his IFF transponder, the facility's security forces effectively ignored the little guy.

At least it wasn't like she had a lot of difficulty finding shelter; with the battle that had evidently raged in the security wing of Deep 13, there were hundreds of wrecked defense robots to conceal herself behind.

Violet was huddled behind the shattered bulk of a GUAR-D-N, killing time until a group of ENFRC-Rs passed by, when she became conscious of the fact that she had no idea what she was doing. Aside from giving her a few brief directions, GRAD-E hadn't said what her destination was.

_GRAD-E?_

**yes?**

_This isn't the way to D-TIC, is it?_

**that is correct.**

_So where AM I going, then?_

**your current objective is to gain access to the security department's armory and storage center. within there should be multiple spare iff transponders, one of which you will install on yourself. after this is done, you will be able to reach d-tic unit 001 without fear of being accosted.**

_Okay._ She waited in silence for two minutes more, content with his answer, when Spidey gave a chirp from his position on top of a pile of burned out MV-Rs. The coast was clear.

Violet was on her way through an unusually clean passage, when GRAD-E broke in, sounding rather perturbed.

**eve probe. upon attempting to activate this corridor's camera network, i discovered that it is out of commission due to an electrical fault. since I cannot offer observations on the security robots' movements, it would be best to locate another storeroom that would contain the transponder we need.**

The white probe paused a second, and looked around. Spidey began to mimick her, spinning around in circles on its six legs. When she saw no one hostile looking, she said, _I think it'll be fine, GRAD-E. We're only fifty meters from the armory, and I don't notice any bad guys. I've got _loads_ of time._

With that, Violet picked up Spidey, who let out a surprised squeak, and bolted down the hallway. In all of five seconds, she was at the entrance of the armory. After slamming her fist on the access panel in triumph, the door slid open with a groan.

Inside was an ENFRC-R, who had been leaving the room at the exact same time as she was entering it. _Bonk._ The two 'bots stared at each other stupidly.

Then, before she could move a millimeter, the ENFRC-R let out an unearthly wail that echoed throughout the facility, which was rapidly joined by a chorus of klaxons. Security lights began flashing, and an emotionless female voice spoke through the PA system.

_Code Red. Infiltrator located in Security Department Armory 1A, Floor B1._

_Code Red. Infiltrator located in Security Department Armory 1A, Floor B1._

As the words repeated over and over, Violet deployed her plasma gun and shot the guardbot. But the damage had already been done.

**hide, eve probe. it is your only option. there are far more hostiles than you could hope to defeat.**

Spidey scuttled into a corner, and retracted his legs, looking for all the world like an over-sized egg. For a moment, Violet thought of doing the same, but then realized that it would be pointless. They'd only need to do a full sweep with their scanners, and they'd find that the supposedly deactivated EVE probe was, in fact, running. And since she didn't have an IFF transponder installed, that would end badly.

Violet frantically searched the armory, trying to think of a way to escape, when something in the ceiling caught her eyescreen. An air duct.

She almost barreled through it, when she realized that a gigantic hole would probably draw some unwanted attention. With an exaggerated amount of care, she removed the vent cover, and went into the shaft, fastening it shut behind her.

There was barely enough clearance for her. Secure in the knowledge that she was safe, Violet settled down to wait. She didn't have to for very long.

She heard the door slam open, beneath her. The EVE probe peered through the vent.

One, two, three, and finally four GUAR-D-Ns ran in, their arm mounted weapons swiveling around, looking for a target. After they determined that the coast was clear, a line of ENFRC-Rs filed in after them, and began scanning the whole room. A number of times Violet had to shy away from the vent's exit, as the sinister red light of the scanning beams would slide over her hidey hole.

After an eon, they left.

Violet hovered back down, and tried the door. It slid open, and she peeked out.

The corridor was infested with security 'bots. She ducked back inside, praying that none of them saw her.

Well, it was only a small setback. After she set up the IFF transponder, they wouldn't notice her anymore. With that in mind, she opened the container marked, _Type 6 IFF units._

It was locked. She tried to pry the bin open, using all her strength, to no avail. Designed by the same engineers who had built her, it was a case of the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force.

Spidey reactivated, and saw her struggling. He raced forward to help. But there was not much he could do, since he didn't possess any fingers. Or, for that matter, _arms_.

**your struggle is futile. under a code red, the armory is restricted only to security personnel who possess the proper codes.**

Violet stopped wrestling with the container. _Why don't you give me them, then? _

GRAD-E didn't say anything.

_Oh, wait. Let me guess. You don't have them, because-_

**all security concerns are handled by d-tic. please excuse me, i must think of a solution for the quandary you have created.**

She spluttered. I_ created? It wasn't like… _Pause. _Well, yeah, _maybe_ I should have listened to you when you found out that the cameras were down. I guess._

**silence, please.**

**

* * *

**

After ten minutes, GRAD-E hadn't managed to come up with any ideas. Violet had pulled out her trusty datapad, and was playing a game of checkers against Spidey when she got an idea.

_GRAD-E?_

**WHAT.**

She winced. _I was wondering… are the ventilation systems in Deep 13 all interconnected?_

**yes, but i fail to see how that is related to-**

**ah. i suppose that is a functional idea. but there is still the matter of the guards who will be in D-TIC's room.**

Violet glanced at her spiderbot, who chirped a couple times. _Spidey could provide a distraction. After all, when they discovered me here in the armory, everyone in the sector came as fast as they could._

**i am impressed with your tactical acumen. very well, as there are no other alternatives that present themselves, we will use your plan.**

**

* * *

**

Yet again, GRAD-E's maps proved helpful. With his knowledge of the myriad ways the air shafts of Deep 13 meandered through the facility, she soon found herself above D-TIC's chamber. She looked down, into the room.

It was pretty underwhelming. Fifty meters square, with a blocky computer in the center, and two or three GUAR-D-Ns standing at the entrance. They were so still, that they resembled statues more than robots.

Then, sirens started hooting again.

_Code red. Intruder located in_ _Security Department Surveillance Room 5C, Floor B1._

In a flurry of activity, the 'bots rushed out the door. With a sigh of relief, Violet gave the grate below her a mighty shove. It fell to the ground with a clatter.

She gracefully flew down, and began tapping at the keyboard mounted on the side of D-TIC, when she was rudely interrupted.

"Please present identification, or be fired upon."

The EVE probe turned around. Right in front of her, was a GUAR-D-N unit who must have been just out of site from her vantage point up in the air duct. It said, in a monotone, "No identification presented. Unknown intruder marked as HOSTILE."

She soared desperately up, and three blasts of super-heated plasma sailed right through where she had been, tunneling deep into the ground. Violet returned fire, only to be dismayed when a shimmering shield of energy flashed into existence, absorbing and deflecting most of her shots.

The other robot, unperturbed, lifted its other arm and filled the air with lasbolts. Several of them scored direct hits, and Violet hissed in pain as spots on her frame blackened. This was most definitely a lopsided fight.

Then she remembered what GRAD-E had said. Lining up her gunsight, she took aim, and fired at the one weak point that the GUAR-D-N model securitybot had. Its optical sensors.

As before, the energy shield flared on. But even though it soaked up most of the bolt, it couldn't contain the sheer amount of heat emitted by the glob of blasma. Its sensor lenses cracked, then melted away completely.

The GUAR-D-N did not react to this well. It began firing blindly in random directions, seeming to hope that a stray shot would hit Violet by pure chance. Unfortunately, most of its las- and plasma bolts ended up striking the largest target in the room, D-TIC.

Admirably, the computer managed to withstand a few hits before promptly exploding.

Klaxons around the base cut off with a strangled squawk, and the security 'bot came grinding to a halt, rocking back and forth. Could it be…?

_Warning: D-TIC unit 001 has suffered irreversible damage. Temporarily reassigning base defense duties to: GRAD-E, unit 001._

The alarms turned back on, letting out a long, mournful cry that meant only one thing. All clear.

_Code Red status lifted. Priority One Counter-Infiltration Defense Protocols deactivated. Base personnel may now return to their assigned stations._

Violet shielded her eyescreen as the normal overhead lighting came back on, replacing the red glow of the emergency lights she had become so accustomed to. The chuffs and moans of distant machinery could be heard. Then, a familiar voice came on the PA system.

**"you are to be commended for your work. thank you, eve probe 004."**

Her eyes smiled. "Oh, please, call me Violet."

**"yes. well, in any event, i suppose that you wish to return to the **_**axiom**_**…"**

"Actually, I don't live _on_ the ship. No one does anymore. We've started a colony, back here, on Earth."

**"operation recolonize has been resumed? the entire bnl starliner fleet has returned?"**

"Oh, no, we're the only ones so far. But Auto sent me to start that fusion power plant to get enough power so that we could contact the others. We might be able to convince their autopilots to come back."

**"so they are not aware of the fact of **_**axiom's**_** landing on earth. interesting."**

"Why is that?"

**"nothing specific. i apologize, as you can imagine, i have received little in the way of news before your arrival.**

**"the bnl teleportation hub has now been reactivated. but, before you leave, it would please me if you would allow yourself to be repaired."**

Violet suddenly became conscious of the painful holes scoring her frame. "Oh, right! Which way do I need to go?"

**"a guide will be provided."**

The door opened, and an ENFRC-R came in. She immediately had her gun out, and was eying the 'bot suspiciously, when she became aware that it wasn't moving to attack her. She sheepishly disarmed her plasma gun, and followed it out.

After a few twists and turns, they arrived at the Security sector's Repair Ward. And who would be waiting for her there but Spidey! She flew up to him, giving the robot a hug. "You made it! And I see that you weren't hurt at all, either."

The smaller 'bot shuffled its many legs. "Dwoot."

**"time, EVE probe. you do not want to be tardy in reurning to your superiors, i surmise."**

Violet released the spiderbot. "Right. Just a quick patch-up, okay, GRAD-E?" She floated into the Ward, and the familiar sets of arms lowered down. One gave her a speedy diagnostic scan, and the other reached down with a red boot.

She lifted up her hands, blocking the boot from being affixed. "Whoa! I only wanted some external body work. No boot, please!"

The arm disregarded her, and kept trying to attach the diagnostic boot. Beginning to get mad, she said, "Hey! GRAD-E, get this stupid machine to cut it out! GRAD-E?"

**"please comply. you are making this process needlessly difficult."**

Violet snatched the boot, and threw it across the room. "You know, GRAD-E, I think I'd rather get fixed at home. Nothing against you, but I don't really feel comfortable with this anymore."

The arm went over to the fallen boot, and picked it up. It then made one final try. Violet gave a mighty swat, causing the mechanical limb to swing backwards. In the background, she noticed Spidey chattering agitatedly, seeming unsure as to what to do. "GRAD-E, I really mean it! Cut it out!"

Then the ENFRC-R in the room flicked on a suspension beam, immobilizing her. "What the-"

On the boot went. Then…

Darkness.

* * *

GRAD-E ordered the faulty EVE probe to be taken to the laboratories on Floor B60, where he could probe her inner workings with more advanced tools than those that were available in the Repair Ward. Meanwhile, he had a great deal of work ahead of himself. After seven hundred and five years, it was time to bring the Deep Thirteen Research and Production Facility back online.

So it wasn't surprising that he completely overlooked the fact that SPYD-R unit 089 had disappeared. After all, what could one robot do?


	15. Interlude

_A/N_

_Yes, I am aware that this is completely and utterly a filler update. But hey, at least I have an excuse. One word: Midterms._

* * *

You are inside a small, brick house. There are five cubbyholes, all empty. There are also several footlockers, which are securely closed. A battered BULLETIN BOARD is attached to the wall. A door lies to the NORTH.

**examine bulletin board.**

* * *

The bulletin board is covered with pieces of paper that have been tacked on, all different sizes. There is a POEM, a TO-DO LIST, a DRAWING, and a NOTE.

**look at poem**

* * *

The poem is written in a neat, precise hand:

_Rose is red,  
Violet is blue,  
Lily is white,  
and I am too._

Some words have been scrawled at the bottom. While someone has apparently tried to cross them out, the first sentence is still somewhat legible.

_THIER ONCE WAS A MAN FROM NANTUCKIT  
WHO'S DICK WAS SO LONG HE COULD..._

The rest is unreadable.

**look at list**

* * *

look at [to-do list]

TO-DO

_Get fertilizer from the McConnells._

_Fix sprinkler system._

_Check on apple grafts._

_Drop by Eve's, see if she needs anything._

_Kick the ever-living crap out of Rose if she screws around with my plants again._

Below this, some graffiti has been added. It is of a large human hand. The middle finger is upraised.

**look at drawing**

* * *

There is an excellent rendition of a ship's autopilot on this piece of paper. Its single, red eye seems to follow you around the room.

**look at note**

**

* * *

**

Truly, you have never seen a finer example of calligraphy. However, the words on the note clash with the beautiful, flowing handwriting.  
_  
Rose-_

_If you steal my drawing supplies ONE MORE TIME, I swear I'll kill you._

_I'd have loaned them to you, if you'd just ask. At least I would have, if you didn't insist on acting like such a total wanker._

_Violet_

Remarkably, the note has been left completely unmarked.

**examine room**

* * *

You are inside a small, brick house. There are five cubbyholes, all empty. There are also several footlockers, which are securely closed. A battered BULLETIN BOARD is attached to the wall. A door lies to the NORTH.

**leave**


	16. Chapter 15

In the Appalachians, a thunderstorm was raging. Rain pummeled the ground, while high winds shook the few stunted trees that had managed to take root on the cold, barren dirt.

Amidst one of the many piles of rock and debris, which had sloughed down the mountainsides due to erosion, there was a mighty groan that echoed the grumbling thunder.

Rocks began shivering, before bouncing their way down the slope. Soon, the ground opened, revealing a metal platform, slowly rising to the surface. Mounted on it was a satellite dish, which began scanning the sky, searching for a communications satellite it knew to still exist.

* * *

Auto did not like thunderstorms.

At first, he thought that he detested it purely because it seemed so… unnatural. But then his always logical mind had pointed out that rain was a _natural_ weather phenomenon.

After this realization, he spent several hours in deep thought, attempting to figure out why he had this strange aversion. This sort of introspection was something the autopilot never had time to do back when he had been piloting the _Axiom_ in space, so it was oddly pleasurable.

He eventually came to the conclusion that he was simply unused to weather. Thus, he resolved to become as acclimated to storms as possible. Despite the fact that after every lightning strike, his self-preservation subroutines would scream at him that he should button the bridge up tight with blast shielding. And as his shipwas one of the tallest structures in the colony, that happened very often.

Auto was doggedly staring out the front windows, into the downpour that seemed to have consumed the entire world, when he noticed the computer chime. It then said something he hadn't expected to hear for several years to come.

_Incoming transmission._

Shocked, he swiveled to face the bridge's main holoscreen, which flicked on. On it was an ancient logo, one that he had last seen seven hundred and five years ago, on the reports that had been beamed to his ship four times a year.

BnL Earth Central – DEEP 13

After a second, the logo disappeared, replaced by three words: AUDIO TRANSMISSION ONLY. With a hiss and a pop, a voice began speaking. Violet's.

"_AUTO unit 001… AUTO unit 001… do you read?"_

His faceplate widened fractionally. While work crews had been feverishly repairing the teleportation device found in Lab 29, it was estimated to take 1.3 hours more before the work was complete.

This, however, was excellent news. It meant that the EVE probe was still relatively unharmed. He might even be able to convince Captain McCrea to assign more of the colony's limited resources to the rescue effort.

Without hesitation, he said, **"Confirmed. Report on your situation."**

The speakers crackled for a while, before a response came. _"This is EVE probe 004. I am currently located in the Deep 13 Research and Production facility, at its Residence Life sector. I am unharmed, I repeat, UNHARMED."_

"**Excellent. Please remain at your current location. A rescue party will arrive shortly."**

"_No thank you, sir. Do NOT send anyone through the teleportation device."_

Auto reared back. **"Why?"**

There was another pause. _"It would be best if I let someone else explain…"_ There was the sound of a microphone changing hands, and then a confident, male voice rang out.

"_This is Grady Johnson, administrator of Deep 13 and leader of the humans who have resided here for seven hundred years. I must thank your EVE probe for finding us, as we have been completely unaware of the _Axiom's_ return."_

"**You are welcome. Please inform me as to why we cannot use the teleportation device."**

"_Because we're trying to fix our end, autopilot. If you send anyone through, you'll wreck our chances of getting out of Deep 13. Just wait about twelve hours, and I'll come through personally. Along with your EVE probe."_

"**But could you not pause your repair efforts? Then we could use the device without disrupting your-"**

The static began to overwhelm the transmission. _"I'm sorry… yo--- f-ding out… r-pe-t, do not… use teleporter…"_

_Signal lost. Attempt to reopen communication?_

"**Negative."** Auto glared at the now blank holoscreen, before switching it off with an errant twist of a spoke. While ordinarily he would have taken the cautious route, and accepted the administrator's demand, there was something he disliked about the message he had received. More than the thunderstorm outside.

"**Computer. Analyze last received transmission."**

_Encryption verification: genuine. Signal triangulation: confirmed – Deep 13. Probability of transmission being authentic approaches unity._

"**Calculate chance of transmission being synthetic in nature."**

_Insufficient data. Impossible to determine if an audio transmission is possibly artificial without additional information._

Logically, he should listen to what the computer had said. Logically, he should agree to Johnson's sensible request.

But he didn't. Perplexing.

* * *

"I don't like this."

"Shut up."

"I mean it, I _really_ don't like this."

Rose, fed up with Daisy's whining, punched her sister on the side. "Stop complaining! What do you think he's going to do, eat you?" Daisy flinched, and finally quieted down.

They were waiting in the bridge's lobby for their sisters to arrive. While her first inclination had been to refuse Auto's call, she had changed her mind when Daisy had _also_ said that she didn't want to go. After all, Rose didn't want to be seen as some kind of weenie. And it had taken only a little bit of bullying to convince Daisy to come along.

The doors hummed open, and Lily came in, followed shortly by the rest of their little family. Well, little family plus one trash compactor. Rose rolled her eyes when she saw Wall-e tagging along behind Eve, as he always did.

Rose only grunted in response to everyone else's hellos, and got into the elevator, impatient to get on with the whole meeting.

When she saw how antisocial Rose was being yet again, Lily sighed. Determined to smooth over the awkward moment, she said to Eve, "So, how're you guys doing?"

In way of response, Eve bent over and gave Wall-e a spark-kiss. They both giggled.

Trying to ignore Rose's gagging in the background, Lily waved towards the elevator. "Well, we'd all better get going. Best not to keep Auto waiting."

Seeing one of her sisters lingering behind, she added, "You too, Daisy."

Happily, the elevator was more than big enough to fit all of them in. Even with Daisy doing her best to huddle in the back.

When they exited the elevator, they were nonplussed to find Auto in deep conversation with someone else already.

Daisy cried out in recognition, her fear forgotten. "Oh, that's Joel. Hey, Joel!"

Both figures turned to face the group of robots. One was a man wearing a dirt-stained set of overalls, which had evidently seen a lot of use. He smiled. "Hey, little lady. Long time no see. Still keeping up with your studies?"

The youngest EVE probe nodded eagerly. "Yep! I've been learning how to program in BLOSS, now. Graduated up from C triple plus."

"That's good." He gestured at Auto. "Me 'n Auto here have been talking about Lab 29's teleporter. Darned thing fried just about every circuit in its little brain."

The autopilot rolled along his track, causing Daisy to remember where she was. She shrank away from the wheel-shaped robot. **"Mr. Joel Hodgson has been instrumental in the repair work being done on the BnL teleportation unit. Due to his skills, the device is currently ready for use."**

Rose snorted. "That's nice. What does that have to do with us?"

"I have to agree." All the people, both 'bot and human, stared in surprise at who had spoken up. It was Eve. Seeing everyone look at her, she shrugged. "It's a good question. What is it that you need us for, Auto?"

Silently, the two robots regarded each other. Then, apparently coming to a decision, Auto said succinctly, **"A rescue mission."**


	17. Chapter 16

Lily winced as the datapad sailed through the air, narrowly missing her. Right at that moment, she wished she didn't have family. Why, you might ask?

Wall-e and Eve were fighting.

Perhaps fighting might be too strong a term. It was mostly Eve yelling, with Wall-e occasionally saying a word or two that would simply enrage her further. She had even gotten so angry that she had lapsed back into her native tongue, machine code. This hardly helped matters, especially since Wall-e only had a limited understanding of code. Not to mention the fact that she was speaking so quickly that her voice resembled a chipmunk on methamphetamines.

It had all started with a rather simple misunderstanding. Wall-e had assumed he was coming along, and joined everyone else on the teleporter. When she noticed what he was doing, Eve very carefully removed him. Where they were going wasn't safe, she had said. She'd prefer it if he stayed behind.

He disagreed. The situation spiraled from there.

Eve had gotten so far as to actually call up Auto, and demand that he order Wall-e to stay behind. In response, the autopilot had calmly pointed out in that he really had no jurisdiction over the matter, as Wall-e was not, and had never been, one of the ship's robots. If he wanted to come along, so be it.

She then tried appealing to Captain McCrea, who expressed that he didn't feel comfortable "telling Wall-e what to do with his own life." Eve hadn't reacted too well to that, which was what had led to the datapad being hurled across the room.

And they were _still_ arguing.

Lily had tried to break up the disagreement, back at the beginning, only to almost get a plasma bolt to the face for her offers. And she couldn't hope for any assistance from her other sisters. Rose was providing a _sotto voce _running commentary on what Eve was saying to Joel, who was grinning like an idiot, and Daisy was doing her best to pretend nothing was happening.

So she felt greatly relieved when she got the message on her datapad. In any other circumstance, the news would have been terrible. As it was, it was an answer to her prayers. She clapped her hands, getting the two robots' attention. "Guys! I've got some bad news here."

The shutters on Wall-e's eyes blinked, and he looked concerned. "Ah… what's problem?"

"Oh, some stupid school kids on a field trip have spilled herbicide all over one of my experimental plots. I've got to clean it up before my pineapples are ruined for a second time."

Eve spoke up, the argument seeming to have temporarily slipped from her mind. "I'm sorry to hear about that. You sure you can't get someone else to help take care of it?"

"Oh, no, I'm afraid the only person I could trust with that kind of a job is myself." _And now to spring the trap. _"Which means you'll be short a person for this expedition. It might be a good idea to have someone else fill in. Like, oh, I don't know…" She began blatantly staring at a certain trash compactor 'bot.

Seeing where this was going, Eve gave in. "Fine, Wall-e. You can come. It's just…" She gave the love of her life a worried look. "…I don't want you to get hurt. After what happened the last time, I swore to myself. Never again."

Seeing how distressed she was, Wall-e threaded his fingers through her own. He gently pulled her over, so that they could be directly face-to-face with one another. "It's okay, Ev-a. I understand."


	18. Chapter 17

Joel made a last minute systems check, as he really didn't want an unfortunate accident to occur. Everything seemed to be fine. With the amount of work he and his new assistant technician, Frank, had put in, he'd have to accept that there really wasn't anything more that could be done.

He glanced at the robots, who were barely able to fit on the two-meter wide platform. Taking a deep breath, he said the magic words.

"Push the button, Frank."

* * *

Subroutine ZZ9 was extremely busy, but not to such an extent that it would abandon correct procedure. As a result, when the anomalous power surge occurred on Floor B1, Subsector Delta, it instantly bumped up an Incident Log to its immediate superior.

Or at least, tried to. Local Subsector Coordinator Allen Jones was not at his station. Rather than wonder why this was, ZZ9 simply went one level higher in the hierarchy. But it appeared that the Sector Coordinator was similarly absent from his post.

On and on this went, until ZZ9 was all the way up to the Office of the Administrator of Deep Thirteen. And Doctor Wallace Breen, the Department of Personnel informed it, was away on 'indefinite administrative leave.'

This was unprecedented. But back-up protocols did exist for all types of situations, including ones where no human superiors were available. ZZ9 contacted GRAD-E unit 001.

Upon reaching the supercomputer, however, it was curtly informed that all communications were currently restricted due to an ongoing experiment. Unless the matter was of Priority Three urgency or higher, it would have to wait until 1800 hours.

Aware that it had used all options at its disposal, ZZ9 shelved the Incident Log, marking it to be delivered at that later time. There were a great deal of other tasks it had to oversee, and it had already wasted enough of its allocated processing power on the mysterious electricity surge.

* * *

Deep 13 wasn't quite what the group had been expecting. When they came through the teleporter, they had been braced for a mob of understandably ticked-off humans, who would probably demand to know why they had gone through the 'porter expressly against their leader's wishes.

Instead, the place was deserted. The lights were on, but nobody was home. When they cautiously went out into the hallway, the situation was identical. Completely empty. They'd have been tempted to think that the place was abandoned, if it wasn't for the omnipresent thumping of distant machinery they could hear.

With Eve leading the way, they began to wander the facility. It wasn't like they were lost, as their internal mappers took care of that issue. They only had no idea of where they needed to go.

While everyone else had stopped to take a break, to try to make sense of their surroundings, Wall-e rolled off to rummage through a pile of debris. Sadly, most of it seemed to be electronic components, possibly robotic. None of the stuff that he liked.

While sifting through the junk, he paused. He thought that he had seen a sudden, flickering movement out of the corner of his eye, off in one of the connecting corridors. He looked up. There it was again.

It took him a moment to recognize the blurred shapes, and another second to remember the word for them. "Ev-a! Hovercarts!"

* * *

Technically speaking, the vehicles weren't mere 'hovercarts.' They were FR8-R class hover equipped transports, each able to carry up to two tons of material at speeds approaching one hundred miles per hour.

And every one of them was loaded right up to capacity. As the probes followed them, with Eve carrying Wall-e with her, they had to give the hovertrucks a wide berth. Several times, particularly on tight corners, the FR8-Rs had a bad tendency to swerve.

Soon, they emerged into an enormous room, which, Eve guessed, had once served as Deep 13's lobby. However, it appeared that they were being put to different purposes now.

The hovertrucks came to a halt, and powered down. The moment they touched the ground, teams of 'bots rushed forward, and began unloading gear from the FR8-Rs, setting it all down next to several identical sets of equipment. Eve put down Wall-e, who looked slightly ill from the high-speed chase, and blinked. "Are those teleporters?"

Daisy shaded her eyescreen from the harsh overhead lights, and she peered over at the forest of machinery. "I… yes. They definitely are, I'd recognize those quantum tunnelers anywhere."

Eve shook her head in incomprehension. "But what would anyone need that many 'porters for?"

"I'm not sure." Daisy shrugged. "Maybe Grady was planning to have all his people visit the colony at once?"

They watched in silence, as the FR8-Rs finished dropping off their loads, and zoomed off. Some technician robots began setting up the equipment, continuing to ignore the intruders. After some quick mental calculations, Daisy estimated that it would take about ten hours for everything to get fixed up. Exactly what the message had said.

Their reverie was interrupted by a shout from Rose. "Hey, everybody! I think we've found the place where Violet said she'd be!"

The two of them looked over. Rose, along with, surprisingly, Wall-e, were over by a particularly large doorway. The sign above it was still barely readable, despite being scarred by gunfire.

**R-S--ENCE LIF-**

**DO--ITO-I-S, CAF-TERIA, REC. -CTIVI-IES**

* * *

"Hellooooooo? Anyone in here?" Rose snorted. "Guess not." She pulled her head out of the doorway of yet another empty community lounge.

"You know what, guys? I'm starting to think that Grady guy was a BIG FAT LIAR." Without waiting for an answer from her companions, she went to the next door over. She shrieked, "HEY, ASSHOLE! YOU IN THERE?" When there was once again, no reply, Rose angrily rocketed down the hallway, leaving her sisters behind.

While Eve would normally have condemned her sister's behavior, right then she couldn't blame Rose. The Residence Life sector was kind of creepy. More run down than the rest of the base, a few of the corridors had even collapsed. The shattered husks of dead robots littered the area so thoroughly that it was getting hard to keep going.

But while Rose's response to the atmosphere was to project a false air of bravado, Eve didn't need to do anything like that to reassure herself. She squeezed Wall-e's hand. He had been steadfastly next to her the entire time.

Of course, poor Daisy had no such support. The other 'bot had become even more withdrawn than usual. She was spending most of her time not even looking at the surroundings, just fiddling with her datapad.

While they stopped to wait for Daisy to catch up, the youngest EVE probe gave an uncertain cough as she drew up to them. "Um, Eve? Would you mind doing something for me?"

With a confused nod, Eve said, "Sure."

"Turn on your Geiger counter, please."

She flipped it on, only to be alarmed when it immediately began squealing. Wall-e, worried when he saw the expression on her eyescreen, began nervously looking around. Then Eve managed to get herself under control, and gave his hand another squeeze.

Daisy said, chagrined, "Sorry. I was trying to make sure that it wasn't my imagination. That's way above background level, isn't it?"

"You could say that again." Eve shakily laughed. "Fortunately, the number of rads I'm measuring is not anywhere near what could hurt us. We should be safe."

A third voice butted into the conversation. "What about humans?"

It was Rose. Eve blinked, and said, "That'd be a whole different story. Why?"

Looking unusually solemn, the EVE probe said, "I've found something you guys _really_ need to look at. I… can't even begin to describe it."


	19. Chapter 18

According to few signs still left in the Residence Life sector, the room Rose took them to was the lobby for Deep 13's Dormitories. And it was filled with dead human bodies.

"I thought that there'd be a better chance of finding someone at the dorms. But, well… I discovered this instead." Rose waved at the many skeletal corpses. "From what Daisy said about the radiation, I'm guessing there was some kind of horrible industrial accident."

Daisy, still tapping away on her datapad, nodded in agreement. "That would be the most logical conclusion."

Having heard her sister's opinions on the matter, Eve turned to Wall-e, who had been contentedly watching the other 'bots hash things out. He had never been an overly analytyical robot, and as such was thoroughly surprised when she asked, "What do you think?"

Gathering his thoughts, Wall-e gave the entire room a once-over, his binocular shaped eyes whirring. He then firmly said, "No."

The three EVE probes said in unison, "Why?"

"Because…" Wall-e rolled over to one of the skeletons. "…they all died running away. See, all crumpled funny like killed in middle of running?" He prodded at the skeleton's feet and said, "Pointing away from door. Bad things at door, that they all were scared of?"

"And…" He squinted up, at the scuffmarks leading to the lobby's many exits. "The bad things went away. Not back out to rest of Res-i-dence Life. In rest of dorms, maybe? And, ah…" He paused, and subsequently gestured at the doors.

"…security came after them. Look, plasma holes all over."

Eve hovered next to where he was, and looked from the robotic trash compactor, to the dead body, to the exits leading out, and finally back again to him. With a laugh, she gave him a hug, along with a spark-kiss. "My little genius."

There was the sound of a vocoder buzzing, Rose's. "Um, I don't want to interrupt this absolutely _darling_ interlude, but I thought we were on a mission? You know, to rescue Violet?"

Releasing Wall-e, who was swaying unsteadily on his treads, Eve said, "Right. Well, what do you all think we need to do next? Between those, ah, 'bad things,' and the radiation, I'm not really too sure."

Daisy raised her hand.

"We're not in a classroom, Daisy. You don't need to do that." Seeing the way Daisy shrank when given even this slight reprimand, Eve added, "But go ahead anyway."

"Er, ever since I noticed the high levels of ionizing radiation, I've been conducting sweeps over the entire EM spectrum. And I think I've picked up a distress beacon. Really weak, but definitely BnL standard. It might be Violet. I was thinking we could go check it out."

"I agree with Daisy, for once," Rose declared loudly. "I'm sure we can handle whatever's thrown at us."

* * *

Funnily enough, they didn't have to worry about anyone throwing much of anything at them. It had already all been hurled by whoever had attacked the facility. As they went further into the claustrophobic corridors of the dormitories, the group passed through several dozen makeshift barricades. Every single one was melted almost to scrap metal, and the shells of security robots and dead BnL troopers showed the heavy toll that had been taken to assault these positions.

One weird thing about the situation, which Daisy pointed out, was that there was no evidence of the attackers. The only bodies were of Deep 13 personnel.

They kept on moving along the twisting passageways, with Daisy being the one giving the directions. She would pause at every intersection, and consult her datapad before confidently saying which way they should go.

They eventually reached a section of the dorms that had a very different 'feel' from the rest of the dorms. More austere. Eve asked the others if they noticed this too, but despite agreeing, no one could come up with any decent ideas why it was so. Even Wall-e simply stated that he felt this place could really use Gogh's help.

At last, they stopped in front of an amazingly intact barricade, set up in front of a set of metal blast doors. When Daisy said that the signal was coming from inside, Rose just gave her an incredulous look. "You've got to be kidding me, there's no possible way that a BnL distress beacon is in there. I mean, that's _obviously_ where the last of the bad guys are holed up. And they probably wouldn't be too happy to see us."

Daisy pointed at her datapad. "That's where this thing says, the signal's coming from. At any rate, I'm sure that the bad guys are all long-dead. It's been 710 years, and the only people who could survive that long are BnL 'bots. And I really doubt that anyone like that would have participated in the attack."

Rose harrumphed. "Fine, I know, you've always got all the answers. In the mean time, I'm going to get this door open." She hovered around the barricade, and heaved with all her might on the door's handle. It refused to budge.

After a couple more false starts, she deployed her plasma cannon. The blast door absorbed five of her shots, with only a four-centimeter hole to show for it. Rose began muttering curse words, and scrabbled at the handle again. She was obviously subscribing to the old adage of, "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

Deciding that she had given her sister a good enough chance, Eve nudged Wall-e and said one word. "Laser."

He nodded and rolled forward. Activating his cutting laser, he efficiently sliced through the door's power conduits. Instantly, they slammed open with a clang, causing Rose to be flung sideways. She smacked into the wall. "Ow."

Eve couldn't help it. She giggled. Soon Wall-e started laughing too, along with Daisy.

Rubbing her head, Rose glared at the other three 'bots. "I don't see what's so funny."

They just kept on laughing. The object of their amusement continued trying to maintain her grumpy demeanor, before she joined in also.

After about five minutes of this, they managed to calm down, and went inside.

Where they were astonished to find yet more BnL troopers. Some were slumped over next to the entryway, obviously assigned to guard it. Two more were manning a heavy lasgun emplacement, while the rest were seated at the middle of the room, around a table. They had clearly been enjoying a meal, as their helmets were off, exposing their grinning skulls.

Rose blinked in astonishment. "Was it… mutiny? Is that what happened here?"

"I… I don't know." Eve went over to examine one of the fallen soldiers. "Not a mark on them, it looks like they all died of radiation poisoning. With the number of rads coming off of 'em, I'm surprised they aren't still glowing."

"That'd mean that it was the administrators who used the nuke. Or whatever it was." Rose scratched her head. "That doesn't make any sense; they'd know it'd kill off _everyone_ left in the dorms, not only the mutineers."

Daisy, meanwhile, was busy trying to pry a keycard out of one of a trooper's death-grip. Seeing her problem, Wall-e rolled up to her, and helped force open the soldier's hand.

"Thank you," Daisy said sheepishly. She then turned, and used the card on the only other doorway that exited the room. As she floated into the side chamber, her eyes smiled. "This's it, guys. The distress beacon."

Everyone else followed her in. When he came in, Wall-e's eyes widened. "Wow."

It was another trooper, who was wearing a formidable suit of armor far, far larger than what the other soldiers had. Proudly upright, it was seated on a chair obviously built to handle its bulk, looking for all the world like it was still carefully examining the documents on the desk in front of it.

Rose floated up to look at the papers, and gasped. "Holy crap. I've… never seen so many awards. Even Captain Reardon only had that one letter of commendation from General Armquist." She began to riffle through the documents, causing the many medals slipped amongst the pages to jingle. "Let's see… three Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, _four_ Soldier's Medals, one Silver Star, a Distinguished Service Medal, and a Medal of Honor."

Rose gave the figure an admiring glance. "You were one hell of a guy."

Looking over her shoulder, Eve said, "Girl."

"What?" She stared down at where her older sister was pointing. Sure enough, all of the papers were awarded to one 'Lieutenant Rebecca Conrad.' Rose slowly shook her head. "I sure wish you could tell me your story, lieutenant."

"I think that can be arranged." An arm snaked itself around her, picking up a datapad seated atop the stack of military awards and commendations. Flipping open the back of the handheld computer, Daisy attached a cable from it to her own datapad. "Let's see… yes, there's an audio log." After loading it, she set it to play.


	20. Chapter 19

DECEMBER 21, 2109

Is this thing recording? Yeah, the light's flashing.

Ahem.

Well, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to say. The shrink seems to think that keeping a daily journal will help self-actualize my personality, or whatever that psychobabble crap was. I'd normally think this is a waste of my time, but why the hell not? Not like I have anything better to do with my evenings.

Let's see… I guess I could start with what I've had to eat today. After all, they always say that an army marches on its stomach.

Breakfast: Toast, with blueberry jam. One hardboiled egg. Coffee.

Lunch: Clam chowder. Club sandwich. Diet BnL Soda.

Dinner: Pizza. Slice of plain vanilla cake. Water.

Can't think of anything else. Just another day sitting around in the situation room, staring at D-TIC. Trying to stay sharp in case terrorists randomly materialize out of nowhere to attack Deep 13.

* * *

DECEMBER 22, 2109

Breakfast: Bacon and eggs. Hash browns. Coffee.

Lunch: Hamburger and fries. Diet BnL soda.

Dinner: Meatloaf, with mashed potatoes and green beans. Banana pudding. Water.

Performed a surprise inspection, found Corporal Shephard napping on duty at one of the surveillance rooms. Under my recommendation, Sergeant Williams assigned him latrine duty, thus making both him and the rest of his squad pretty unhappy. Humans are never as good at cleaning the bathrooms as the 'bots are.

Other than that, the rest of my command is surprisingly ship-shape. For a garrison company.

* * *

DECEMBER 23, 2109

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with toast. Banana. Coffee.

Lunch: Chili. Diet BnL soda.

Dinner: Some kind of tuna and rice casserole. Not that bad. Cake again. Water.

Got together with Dr. Betruger for a game of chess, like we do every Tuesday. Nicest egghead I've ever known, though I think he lets me beat him on purpose.

He's been pretty withdrawn lately. With the five-year deadline approaching, I'd be too if I were in charge of Operation Cleanup. And everyone's heard about how PO'd the President's been getting about his progress. Unfairly, in my opinion.

* * *

DECEMBER 24, 2109

Breakfast: The worst French toast I've had in my entire life. Dear god, I still have that taste in my mouth. Oh, and coffee.

Lunch: Again, the chefbot seemed to be malfunctioning. I got served eight orders of haggis, despite asking for lasagna. Ate some trail mix from a vending machine, with a diet BnL soda.

Dinner: Ordered Chinese take-out rather than risk the mess hall. God bless you, General Tso. Treated myself to a margarita, since it's Christmas Eve.

Some of my men are moping around the base, along with most of the civvies. I have to admit, I know how they feel. Lot's of people's families are off in space, including my daughter Patricia. It'll be a lonely Christmas.

* * *

DECEMBER 25, 2109

Breakfast: Oatmeal. Tasted fine, they must have fixed whatever the problem was. Coffee.

Lunch: Got the lasagna I was having a hankering for. Diet BnL soda.

Dinner: Finished my Chinese leftovers.

Wouldn't you know it, the brass are still investing in military spending. Thought they'd totally given up on the whole defense thing as a waste of money, after the Consolidation War ended. Heck, that's why I ended up as a garrison commander, there just wasn't much demand left for Sky Angels anymore. If it weren't for my medals, I'd probably have been booted out of the army.

Anyway, the eggheads have been working on a new prototype military-grade troop transport, and they actually asked me to take it on a test drive! They said something about how they wanted a soldier's opinion on how it handled.

For about twenty minutes, I got to tootle around an obstacle course they had built down there in the labs. Even got to fire its gun a few times. Really smooth ride. Best Christmas present ever.

But right when test was almost finished, the administrator walked in. Found out later that GRAD-E had told him an unscheduled laboratory trial was occurring, so he decided to check it out. When he saw me driving the car, Breen's face turned all red, and he started ranting about not letting a slack-jawed grunts interfere with experimental protocol. In response, I pointed out that I wasn't a 'grunt'; I was Deep 13's garrison commander. As such, I was free to examine any and all areas of the facility for security purposes. He wasn't amused.

Even threatened to fire me. What a prick.

* * *

DECEMBER 26, 2109

Breakfast: Pancakes. Coffee.

Lunch: Tomato soup. Grilled cheese sandwich. Decided to switch things up, had lemonade to drink.

Dinner: Fish sticks, Mac and cheese. Pecan pie. Water.

Why me?

Dr. Clayton Forrester, that creep, tried to pick me up again. Yammered about how he liked women in uniform. When I pointed out that I was twenty fucking years older than him, he said that just meant I had a lot of 'experience.'

Then I informed him that if he kept stalking me, I'd kick him in the balls so hard he'd be wearing them as a bowtie.

He suddenly remembered that he had an urgent appointment, and ran off. Good riddance.

* * *

DECEMBER 27, 2109

Breakfast: Bagel, with cream cheese. Apple. Coffee.

Lunch: Mess hall had something new, real salmon. Had that with rice pilaf and a diet cola.

Dinner: Nothing, except for water.

Discovered I was violently allergic to salmon. Spent most of the day in the Medical Ward. Recording this from a hospital bed.

* * *

DECEMBER 28, 2109

Breakfast: Didn't feel like having anything except for a banana.

Lunch: Ham and cheese sandwich. Due to doctor's orders, no soda. Had a glass of milk instead, which made me feel like I was five years old.

Dinner: Chicken noodle soup. Chocolate chip cookie. Water.

Released from Medical Ward. I tried to go back to work, but Sergeant Williams didn't let me. According to him, I still needed to rest up. I told him the problem had been a food allergy, nothing major. He didn't listen.

I gave in eventually; realizing that D-TIC can do a fine job on its own for a day. I got to catch up on my reading instead.

* * *

DECEMBER 29, 2109

Breakfast: Oatmeal. Coffee.

Lunch: Chef's salad. Diet BnL soda.

Dinner: Spaghetti with meatballs. Cheesecake. Water.

Brought in my suit for its yearly tune-up. As always, First Technician Anderson gave me his lecture about how an up-armored T-8 flight suit is not suitable for garrison commander, and was dangerous to boot. He asked me for the thousandth time to switch to a T-5. I told him to go pound sand.

* * *

DECEMBER 30, 2109

Breakfast: Toast with peanut butter and jelly. Coffee.

Lunch: Beef tacos. Diet BnL soda.

Dinner: Hate to admit it, but tacos again. They're only here once in a blue moon, so I make sure to get plenty of them. Felt so full I didn't have dessert. Water.

Dr. Betruger didn't show up for chess. I've heard he had a bad meeting with Dr. Breen, so I don't blame him.

* * *

DECEMBER 31, 2109

Breakfast: Bacon and eggs with hash browns. Coffee.

Lunch: BLT. Potato chips. Diet BnL soda.

Dinner: Seafood gumbo. Carrot cake. Water.

Haven't seen Betruger anywhere around the base. Then again, Deep 13's big, so that isn't too unusual.

Meanwhile, the mess hall rumor mongers are saying that Operation Cleanup's been canceled.

I don't believe them at all, of course. While he was behind schedule, Malcolm was certain that the Earth wasn't unsalvageable. If he just got a five year extension, he said they had a pretty good shot at getting things back to normal, according to GRAD-E's calculations.

But then again, what do I know? I'm just a dumb grunt.

* * *

January 1, 2110

I'll be damned.

We're abandoning ship. Forthright's just given a speech that Operation Cleanup has _failed_. According to him, the rising levels of toxic heavy metals and other pollutants simply make it impossible to sustain life anymore.

Of course, we all know what he really means. It'd just be too unprofitable to clean all that crap up. Nothing's really impossible anymore; we got to space, didn't we?

After Breen told him that we were essentially leaving Earth to die, Dr. Betruger went and hanged himself.

My men have been asking me how I feel about it all, but I still don't know. On the one hand, I'm relieved, as I can see Patty again. But on the other-

Is that lasfire?

* * *

January 3, 2110

Breakfast: Suitfood.

Lunch: Suitfood.

Dinner: Suitfood.

I've gotten a bit behind about updating this, but I'm sure that my therapist will forgive me. What with him being dead and all.

D-TIC's gone completely insane. Someone, somewhere activated his counter-infiltration defense protocols, and then set them to regard ALL human base personnel as enemy infiltrators. Since the security 'bots are almost everywhere, we were caught with our pants down.

Luckily, my men and I have managed to fortify the barracks, and've already repelled several of D-TIC's assaults. We can hold out for a while. I hope.

We've been trying to contact anyone outside of the base using GRAD-E, but I think he's been hacked too. None of our commlinks are working, except for our short-range suit radios. But I'm pretty sure that they'll figure out something's gone wrong without us telling them.

* * *

January 4, 2110

Breakfast: Suitfood.

Lunch: More goddamned suitfood.

Dinner: What do you think?

We've managed to find and rescue some civvies, one of them turning out to be a scientist. According to him, GRAD-E hasn't been compromised. It did the compromising.

He said Dr. Breen had gone into the supercomputer's room to shut it off to prepare for our departure, when the defense systems activated. And, since he worked in one of its subsidiary control rooms, he could confirm that the signal to D-TIC had been sent from GRAD-E. After it went psycho, he was barely able to flee to the upper floors, where we found him.

If it's true, the situation's gotten worse in a hurry.

* * *

January 5, 2110

Breakfast: I never knew cereal could taste so good. Water to drink.

Lunch: Baked beans. Delicious. And water.

Dinner: Another round of baked beans. Water.

Thank the lord that Private Ulrich managed to grab some nonperishable food from the mess hall during a lull in the attacks. If we had to rely on a suit's recyclers for one more day, I'm pretty sure that we would've gone stark raving mad.

Some good news: we've managed to contact HQ! Our communications wiz, Private Philips, managed to jury-rig a radio transmitter by hooking into the coal mine's commlink systems.

General Armquist said they were going to execute an assault tomorrow morning, and asked us to help coordinate an attack. I agreed, of course.

Then President Shithead had to butt in and tell us that he wished us the best, and was certain that we would have no problem in overcoming the problems we were facing. "After all," he said, "You lived through the Battle of Moscow!"

Yeah, right. Me and about forty percent of my battalion.

* * *

January 6, 2110

Breakfast: Was too jittery to eat.

Lunch: Busy fighting.

Dinner: Now too depressed to eat.

We failed.

* * *

January 7, 2110

Breakfast: Pop-tarts. Water.

Lunch: Instant spaghetti. Water.

Dinner: Canned beef stew. Water.

After yesterday's failed attack, I've lost eighty percent of my effective fighting forces. Of the rest, only half aren't walking wounded.

Deciding that we'd be fucked if I tried to hold the entire barracks, I've begun pulling back my troops to the center of our complex. I'm convinced D-TIC will take advantage of this opportunity. That computer isn't a total idiot, after all.

* * *

January 8, 2110

Breakfast: Granola bar. Water.

Lunch: Canned ravioli. Water.

Dinner: Spam sandwich. Water.

I was right. Now, including myself, there are only ten BnL Security Troopers left.

* * *

January 9, 2110

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs and lima beans. Eugh. Water.

Lunch: Mushy chicken nuggets and French fries. Water.

Dinner: Hamburger in a bag. Water.

Since we were running low on civvie food, I've broken out the MREs. And they're as bad as I remember.

We haven't gotten any more messages from HQ.

* * *

January 10, 2010

Breakfast: Lukewarm pancakes. Water.

Lunch: Turkey with stuffing. This one was actually good. Water.

Dinner: I have no idea why they thought pork sausages and sauerkraut was a good idea for an MRE. While I personally forced my meal down, Private Ulrich got to enjoy _fourths_.

Still no word from HQ.

Dammit, Forthright, have you left us here to die?

* * *

January 11, 2010

Breakfast: A pathetic attempt at French toast, but still better than the version I got on December 24th. Water.

Lunch: Spinach and macaroni casserole. Eh. And water, obviously.

Dinner: Despite proclaiming itself to be a burrito, I have other ideas as to its identity. Water.

Private Shephard found a maintenance 'bot crawling in a ventilation shaft today. No idea what the hell it was doing there, and we don't have a way of finding out either. He riddled the thing with lasbolts so thoroughly that even a dedicated techie couldn't have extracted any useful info from it.

I've been spending the past two hours here, in my bedroom, trying to figure out what GRAD-E was trying to do. It was GRAD-E, no doubt about it, as D-TIC has no authority over maintenance.

Unless…

Gas.

* * *

oh god it hurts it hurts it hurts

god damn you fucking reds you fucking borscht-swilling commies i'll kill you all last thing i do.

the pain

* * *

January 12, 2010

For what it's worth, I was right. He gassed us. According to my suit's sensors, it was some kind of noxious mix of nerve gas and radon. If the first didn't get you, the rads from the second eventually would.

I was lucky, to an extent. Turns out that Technician Anderson was totally wrong. With my suit's O2 tanks, a holdover from when I was a Sky Angel, it was able to switch to canned air. It then administered antidotes.

Not fast enough, though. I'm now blind as a bat. And I still have the radiation to consider.

I could go out in a blaze of glory, I suppose. Try to take down a couple security 'bots before they gun me down.

But funnily enough, I haven't been able to find my fucking keycard. So I'm stuck in here.

Radiation sickness is a bad way to go. I know, I saw what happened after that utter bastard Ilyin torched all of Europe, China, and Russia. In addition to the fact that my oxygen won't last forever.

I think my T-8 still has enough morphine left to stop my heart, after I enter the override code. But first…

I don't know if anyone is ever going to find this, but I have one final request. I think I've managed to get all my personal stuff out onto the desk. All my commendations and awards, things like that.

Please, if you can, take them to Patricia Conrad, my daughter. I know she'd want them.

Patty shouldn't be too hard to find, since she joined up with BnL Security right before leaving Earth. Like mother, like daughter. I think she's serving on the _Saturn_…

That's all I ask.


End file.
